150 new features from Adobe
Video editors who have agreed to pay monthly for Adobe’s “Creative Cloud” subscription plan can expect to receive 150 new features from mid-October. Of specific interest are changes to Premiere Pro, SpeedGrade and AfterEffects.
For starters they include a much improved method of swapping projects between Premiere and SpeedGrade such that you don’t have to muck about with exporting and importing and file formats and all that shenanigans.
Adobe are calling it Direct Link and say you can: “save a project in Premiere Pro and then open the sequence directly in SpeedGrade with no need to deal with interchange formats or any kind of conversion. SpeedGrade then opens the sequence in a familiar timeline that more closely matches how you work in Premiere Pro.”
They go on: “You can access all the clip edit points, transitions, and layers, using the same track layout as Premiere Pro. From there, create your grades, and then reopen the same project in Premiere Pro with all your colour work fully intact. This workflow uses no interchange formats and no importing or exporting – it’s just the same Premiere Pro project moving between the two applications.”
Also new in Premiere is support for Cinema DNG, Sony RAW, Phantom Cine, improved MJPG from Canon 1DC, Sony XAVC Long GOP, Panasonic AVC Ultra (Long GOP), 64 bit ProRes decoding (Mac OS X 10.8 or higher only). Support for exporting XAVC up to 4K and AVCi200 is included as well. You can even work with RED Dragon 6K though why you’d want to is another question entirely. An improved proxy system is said to make things easier when editing these data-intensive formats.
There are tweaks to Premiere’s editing interface including “Monitor Overlays” – displaying various bits of information on either the source or program windows, and tweaks to multicam edits.
See the full Premiere Pro release at http://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2013/09/adobe-premiere-pro-cc-october-2013-release.html including links to a handful of videos which refer to awful things such as “fluid integrated workflows” and “staying in the creative zone”. If you can stomach the unnervingly-smily evangelising presenter, it’s worth a look.
After Effects meanwhile is said to include faster 3D camera tracker and warp stabiliser analysis; a new mask tracker; and an SD-to-HD upscaler which is said to preserve detail. That’s good; you wouldn’t exactly want it losing detail, would you?
You can see all the AE changes in minute detail at http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2013/09/after-effects-cc-12-1-whats-new-and-changed.html
SpeedGrade gets the aforementioned easy embedding within Premiere, one advantage of which is that any format supported by Premiere will now be gradeable in SpeedGrade. A super improvement is multiple masks within a single Looks file. A set of 14 preset “SpeedLooks” is also bundled for adding instant styles to your footage without having to think about it too much. Take a look at http://blogs.adobe.com/movingcolors/ for those features.
For the complete list of the updates, which also affect products such as Media Encoder and Prelude, click on over to http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/events/1309_39968_ibc.html