Adobe teases the next version of SpeedGrade and the new Project Candy

At it’s Moving Colors blog, adobe has teased the next version of Adobe SpeedGrade. Unfortunately it doesn’t really go into the program itself, just going into it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro. I was really hoping for multi-monitor support, as I find it the biggest problem of SpeedGrade. I want to be able to put my scopes huge on a second monitor so I can see them!

Anyway, here are the features that they list, and the videos which I have already shown in the Premiere Pro post.

•The Lumetri Panel in Premiere Pro.

•Curves, Hue and Saturation in Premiere Pro

•Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector in Premiere Pro

•Taking it SpeedGrade, your Lumetri color correct in Premiere Pro shows as a single Lumetri Color Layer in SpeedGrade.

•Introducting Project Candy. This is a new app for your phone that lets you take a photo and color match it in 3D color space and save it to your Creative Cloud library and apply it in Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop or SpeedGrade. To me it doesn’t seem all new, but an update the existing iOS Adobe Color App that would let you take photos to make color swatches. The funny part is while I think it is a cool idea, I would rather have the tech built into After Effects or Premiere, so I could do this with a photo on the computer, as I am much more likely to find a reference image that I want to use instead of a photo I am going to take with my phone.

Adobe teases the next version of Adobe Audition

Adobe has teased the next version of Audition at it’s Adobe Audition blog.

Here is a quick breakdown of the new features revealed.

•Dynamic Link Streaming to play back Premiere Pro sequences directly.

•Full Screen Mirror Video Display on a second monitor.

•Relink Media

•Automatic Session File Backup

•Copy Imported Assets to Session Folder

•Schedule Recording

•Custom Level Meters Crossover Values

•Import/Export Markers

•Brazilian Portuguese Language Support

•Audio Driver Performance and Stability Updates

This is a program I need to delve into more, but really I hope to pass my audio on to a real mixer, so it has never been as important to me.

Adobe teases the next release of After Effects

Todd Kopriva at his AfterEffects blog has teased the next version of After Effects to be shown at NAB next week.

Here is a quick breakdown of the new features.

•Creative Cloud libraries to share graphics and looks between Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator.

•Greater Interactive Performance thanks to a new architecture. Let’s hope it doesn’t break all current plug ins!

•Unified and Simplified previews.

•A preview of Adobe Character Animator.

•Face Tracker Effect.

Yes this all sounds pretty exciting, though the character animator seems pretty niche.

Adobe Reveals the next release of Premiere Pro

Adobe has revealed some features from it’s next version of Creative Cloud at it’s PremierePro blog.

Here is a quick breakdown.

•Lumetri Color Panel. Adobe has integrated more of the color engine of SpeedGrade directly in Premiere Pro, but with simpler to use controls for editors, but all grades will easily pass over to SpeedGrade. Now you get SpeedGrades videoscopes, and controls simplified to work like Lightroom as well as a new Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector.

 The Lumetri Control Panel

New Curve and Hue/Saturation Controls
New Lumetri 3 Way Color Corrector

•Morph Cut allows you to seamlessly morph between to edits in a talking head interview to make it look like a single cut (kind of scary, but also an incredible tool if it works as described).

•CC Libraries have been integrated into Premiere Pro and After Effects so you can save looks and graphics wherever you are logged into Creative Cloud.

•Premiere Clip, Adobe’s portable editing solution has an upgraded workflow.

•Task Oriented Workspaces for editing, coloring, audio work or other needs (much like AVID’s similar functions).

•New formats including ProRes 4444XQ Avid DNxHR, Canon XF-AVC and Panasonic 4K_HS.

•Closed Caption Support

•Composite Previews during trim

•Simpler Keyboard numerical import

•Source Settings as Master Clip Effects

•Improved AAF Exports

•Improved Audio Routing

•Improved Audition workflow, where audition will play the video directly from your media instead of rendering a video of your video.

•Improved Mercury Transmit Performance

•Time Tuner in Premiere and Media Encoder to allow you to retime a show up to 5% easily and possibly up to 10% in either direction without losing quality.

Sounds impressive. I am looking forward to getting my hands on it!

Adobe has given us a peak at the new video features in Creative Cloud

Next Week at NAB Adobe will be showing off the next release of Adobe Creative Cloud’s video suite with updates to apps. We knew this was coming as Adobe announced on March 18th that the next version of Creative Cloud will only work with Mac Os X 10.9 Yosemite and higher.

Check out this video that shows the most exciting new features!

Definition Magazine has an interesting comparison of Fusion, Nuke & Smoke

Adam Garstone at Definition Magazine gives a quick overview of these 3 powerful 3D Compositing Programs. Work a read.

After learning Shake years back I would love to get into one of these, but can’t afford either Nuke or Smoke, but once a free Mac version is released of Fusion by BlackMagic Designs I will probably spend the time to learn it, and hopefully they will have added a good 3D camera tracker by then.

Used Premiere Pro’s Capture for the first time yesterday

I was handed a DVCAM tape yesterday and work was going to rent a DVCAM deck to capture. I said I would do it myself since I have a Sony DS-20 in my office. I used to use it all the time, but it mostly gathers dust now, so it was good to give it a run, and I decided to try it out with Premiere Pro.

Now I knew that Premiere had a very simple capture engine that would work with HDV or DV, so I decided to give it a try. It has very few settings, just which capture setting, then you can set in’s and outs, change clip and tape names and capture a clip or a tape. The problem is that the tape was old, and it kept failing on the capture, and it doesn’t seem to have a setting to automatically break up clips when there is a break in timecode. After many many attempts that failed, I gave up and switched to Final Cut Pro 7.

Final Cut Pro 7 still has a much more powerful capture engine, and will in fact break up a capture if you set it to, so you get clips around the breaks, but surprisingly it managed to capture the whole 1 hour and 50 minutes in one go, not making any breaks.

So honestly I am glad Final Cut Pro 7 still runs on Yosemite, as it does still have some uses. Looks like I will need to keep a backup of this system state before the next OS which will likely break Final Cut Pro 7 completely so I can still capture DV easily if need be.

An additional issue with Adobe Premiere Pro sequences in SpeedGrade CC 2014

So I have been working more with Speedgrade, finishing the grade on this twenty eight and a half minute long show, and I realized another issue.

Actually it is very like the issue with the multicam clips, where you can grade them, and the grade shows up in Premiere, but the Lumetri Effect does not on clips with an Alpha or that or Premiere Pro Text layers.

This is an issue when replacing graphics with textless versions and you can’t just take the same grade from existing clips, because the while the grade shows up, it is does not show up as an effect that you can edit or copy or do anything with in Premiere Pro.

This gives me memories of precomputes and AVID! The horror!

I really hope Adobe fixes this and the the other issues I previously posted with a new update of Creative Cloud at NAB this year, as I really do love how the grade ends up on your original sequence (for the most part). I do really like the program, but some of the issues really do make DaVinci seem more viable for the moment.