Adobe Speach To Text Early Access was not working yesterday, and I realized how quickly I have become addicted to it, it makes Testimonials so much easier!

 

#SpeachtoText @AdobeVideo  

This is what when I tried using the Transcribe sequence in Premiere Pro for a while yesterday. And I realized I don’t ever want to cut a testimonial without the transcription.

It is amazing I can start making selects on my first pass with the transcript. And my comprehension is better. Man this is a feature I can’t live without.

Unfortunately it looks like their 3rd party cloud infrastructure took a hit today.

I am pretty sure Adobe is going to have to expand their infrastructure because this is going to be a popular feature.

Arrow from Knights of the Editing Table copies a frame to your clipboard in Adobe Premiere Pro

 

The awesome Knights of the Editing Table has released a new plugin Arrow for Adobe Premiere Pro that will copy a frame to clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and it is free, and you can save the image as well to a location that you chose.

And for users of their amazing keyboard launcher for Premiere Pro Excalibur, you don’t need this because it was added to the last update.

Adobe Speech To Text Early Access is absolutely amazing for editing testimonials

#SpeachtoText @AdobeVideo

So I applied to the Adobe Speech To Text Early Access program and was granted access, you can read about it and apply here.

I am editing testimonials and an assistant already cut down sequences so just the best bits are in a sequence.

All you have to do is go to the captions workspace and hit the Transcribe Sequence and it renders and uploads the audio track, and very quickly transcribes. I have had it take 3-7 minutes depending on length.

It then very quickly auto transcribes. And yes it has some errors, that are easily fixable. Basically I duplicate the sequence after transcription and make a cut version that I can cut out the pieces I want and cut them into another timeline. You can immediately jump around or search in the transcription, and just having the transcription follow along on the sequence helps my comprehension of what is being said.

This is truly life-changing! This is the most amazing new feature I have run across in an editing program.

And you can also export a txt file with the transcription though it doesn’t contain the timecode or the speakers, and I would love to see the ability to add in the timecode and to add the speakers for more than single speaker transcriptions. Currently the export txt is grayed out in Premiere Pro 2021, but works in the beta.

Transcriptions have always been helpful to find specific things in a long testimonial, but having them connected to the sequence where you can literally jump to an individual word is beyond amazing!

Adobe Updates Audition with M1 in version 14.2 Support and Premiere Pro with Text Gradients and Improved Captions in 15.2

 

Adobe updated Audition to version 14.2 with added M1 Support, the ability to Strip Silence and a new Loudness meter. 

Adobe also updated Premiere Pro to 15.2 with Text Gradients in Essential Graphics, Label Color for Captions and Improved Caption Trimming, the same new Loudness Meter as Audition, improved Canon XF HEVC performance improvements and Direct X12 Display support on Windows.

BlackMagicDesign updated DaVinci Resolve to version 17.2

 

BlackMagicDesign has updated DaVinci Resolve to version 17.2

These are the new features for the Studio Version.

What’s new in DaVinci Resolve 17.2

  • Dramatically improved application startup performance.
  • Live save is now on by default.
  • Support for custom naming for individual timeline clips.
  • Support for adding transitions by double clicking or dragging to viewer.
  • Support for decoding AV1 clips on Windows.
  • Accelerated AV1 decodes on supported Intel, NVIDIA and AMD platforms.
  • Support for decoding MKV clips.
  • Support for exporting IMSC-1 compatible TTML captions in IMF clips.
  • Support for option to include project name subfolder in media management.
  • Support for pasting HDR and color warper attributes in the Color page.
  • Support for Fusion template bundles.
  • Support for applying and managing crossfades in the Fairlight timeline.
  • Support for a batch fade and crossfade editor in the Fairlight page.
  • Support for persisting Fairlight edit mode between application restarts.
  • Support for moving audio clips to match timeline timecode position.
  • Support for setting handles when performing audio only renders.
  • Support for controlling track processing order in the Fairlight mixer.
  • Support for accessing Fairlight patch and link in the edit and deliver page.
  • Ability to show or hide specific audio I/O ports for patching in Fairlight.
  • Support for Fairlight console firmware 1.6 with full FlexBus mixing support.
  • Improved waveform displays in the Fairlight timeline.
  • Improved auto scroll behavior when dragging clips in the Fairlight timeline.
  • Support for ACES color science 1.2.
  • Support for selecting per-clip ACES DCTLs from context menu.
  • Support for new IDTs for the Canon EOS-R5 cameras.
  • Option to use white point adaptation in project settings for RCM workflows.
  • Option to use white point adaptation in Resolve FX color space transform.
  • Support for codec passthrough when rendering IMF JPEG2000 clips.
  • Support for trimming Sony Raw and XAVC MXF in media management.
  • Support for reading gyroscopic metadata on Sony Venice clips.
  • Ability to update RMD metadata files for R3D clips.
  • Improved spatial and temporal deinterlace quality.
  • Improved curves range display for position and zoom on the edit timeline.
  • Improved color management for Blackmagic RAW Gen 5 color science.
  • Improved decode performance for 8K H.265 clips on Apple Silicon systems.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to import custom frame sequences.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to delete timelines.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to query current page.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to add generators and titles.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to specify render alpha options.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to switch layout presets.
  • Improved scripting API with the ability to quit the application.
  • Improved iXML data support with AAF export workflows.
  • General performance and stability improvements.

Blackmagic Design has reduced the price of ATEM Mini Pro and ATEM Pro ISO by $100 each

 

Now I think you only need the $295 ATEM mini if you attach it as a web camera to stream your edit live, but if you want your edit to be live on YouTube or to record it you could go for the mini pro.
Still the Web Presenter may in fact be a better solution for streaming for me. Since I have the $495 Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4k, I have spare SDI ports and that way I could stream a 4k sequence as the ATEM MINI only accepts up to a 1080 60p sequence while the Web Presenter accepts up UHD 60p sequences though streams out at only 1080 60p. Of course I lose the ability to see me in a picture and picture via a gopro.

Remote File Sync for Editing workflows on Remote Systems

 Since I have been looking at work from home solutions for remote video editing, I have been looking at some solutions for file syncing. This would require media and files at remote and local to start, so that you aren’t eating all of your bandwidth copying files, and would of course be easiest with a large single storage solution that you have set to fully sync.

With Premiere Pro I would also recommend using Digital Rebellions Post Haste to set up a file structure that you follow for all projects that so that it is the same on all systems.

Once you have the project setup on a single system, you should duplicate that onto remote hard drives and then you can use a program to sync the files. Now I wouldn’t expect collaboration with the same project files, but this could mean that you sync to a remote file share, and keep your graphics and project files updating not only for backup, but for remote access if necessary.

For Mac Backup there is ChronoSync for $49.99 per license. For Mac or Windows (or FreeBSD) you can use Resilio for $59.90 for a single license, $99.90 for a 5 family member license or $30 a month for Business. Or for Windows you could use ViceVersa for $59.95 for one license, going down for 2 or more licenses.

Now this would be basic solutions, without file remote project management, and if you made changes to projects on both systems it would cause issues, but could easily help for simple setup and even work with assistants using different project files to transfer things back and forth.

Frame.io’s Lisa McNamara and Zack Arnold ACE on Adopting a Post-Production Workflow from March 2020 is well worth a read

Lisa McNamara has written an article with the help of Zack Arnold ACE on the Best practices for Adopting a Remote Post-Production Workflow at Frame.io, and it is well worth a read. It goes into the challenges and security concerns, managing media, communication, collaboration, and even morale, well being and sanity. It is of course also selling Frame.io, but it is an article by them, and the article is great and very in depth including other companies solutions.

Every post supervisor or producer overseeing a team working from home should read this article.

Adobe Support Community post on Premiere Pro Project Manager Consolidate and Transcode Problems

 

So I have been seeing a lot of people complaining about Adobe Premiere Pro’s Project Manger and it’s issues. And I have run into quite a few myself where it just doesn’t work for various reasons.

Well I ran into this post about it from 2017 and CC 2017, and it lists many of the things that will break a consolidate and transcode. This lists some things to know that can be an issue, and may be causing you problems when using Project Manager. Now I don’t know if any of these have been solved, but the Merged clips thing has likely bounced Project Manger for me.

And this makes me want to try out PlumePack from Autokroma even more. I know it is for r3d, BRAW or ProREES and can actually trim without recompressing, but the thing that gets me is that it will bring your organized final folder structure with it, instead of just putting everything into a single folder which has always really pissed off.

Allan Tépper at ProVideoCoalition does an in depth review of the Blackmagic Web Presenter

 Allan T�épper at the ProVideoCoalition has done a very in depth review of the Blackmagic Web Presenter, and since this is one of the real-time remote streaming solutions and the way Sofi Marshall did her streaming, I thought I would link to this awesome review.

I still think that Atem Mini might be the better solution with it’s build in picture in picture, but I haven’t actually tested it, so I don’t know for sure.