2018-1 Premiere Pro: Comparison & Shot-matching

The good folks at Adobe just came out with the 2018.1 release of Premiere Pro. There’s a couple features in this release that are going to change my entire grading process … the Comparison view added to the Program monitor, so you can view your media in several different comparison modes, and in the Lumetri panel’s Color Wheel tab … “Apply Match”.

Yes, shot=matching has made it to Premiere Pro! And it’s now the Color Wheels & Match tab.

Lumetri has had a fairly decent capability to correct things, especially when used with multiple instances and masked adjustment layers. But with no way to compare images easily, and no shot-matching, even with a marvelous control “surface” like the Tangent Elements panel that I use ,,, Lumetri wasn’t a fast way to color correct or to grade.

That’s now changed. After a few days working with this, I’m quite pleased. It uses the Adobe “Sensei” AI to do part of the job of coming up with a setting of the typical colorist’s three-ring Color Wheels “ball” (color or ‘chroma”) and the vertical sliders (brightness or “luma”). It makes a fair attempt to come close to the image used as the Reference image.

In the cover image of the video tutorial I made today, you ca see right below the program monitor’s view of Miriam in an Amtrak train … a blue dot at the left of a line covering about half the image, and a couple arrows and a blue number below that. Those are the controls for choosing not only which clip of the sequence is the Reference, but by scrubbing the dot or the blue number, even which frame of that clip you are using. The arrows jump forward or backward one clip per click.

And also note right above that blue dot, where there’s a line going up the side of the image? That far left edge is of the Reference clip, and the clip being shown is actually the third clip down the sequence. As you can see by the highlighted (selected) clip in the timeline. You can either do side-by-side displays of the Reference and grading clip, or do a vertical or horizontal split or “wipe”. In the split/wipe views, when you move the cursor over the split between the images, you get a two-ended arrow. Click and grab, and you can see more or less of either image, even to completely covering the other image.

It’s very easy to use, and does a pretty good job of a base match. I threw together a series of short clips of a trip that Miriam and I took on the Amtrak Empire Builder train from Portland, Oregon to Minot North Dakota a year ago in late March just to see Glacier Park from the train in snow … well, and ending with a visit with our daughter in North Dakota. The shots chosen are in varied lighting over three days, any time of day or indoors, and never under ‘”controlled” lighting. To say they’re a pain to match is being polite!

This is phone media, from my Samsung S7, very “thin” for color depth, and very difficult to grade … especially to match things that are well off from “neutral”. So this is actually a tougher test than for some of the other media I’ve worked. It’s very good with RED camera media, but I don’t have much of that, and what I’ve got I can’t use publicly. Take a watch as I show what this can do, and a base lesson in how to use it.

The Comparison View and Shot-matching, when combined with a good colorist control surface, now make Premiere Pro’s Lumetri panel well worth considering for grading many of the small to medium projects that still get sent out to a colorist. By saving all the time necessary to prep a project for export/offline work, the time at the colorist’s suite getting ‘conformed” into their grading app, the time spent getting the project back out of the grading suite and back into Premiere Pro, this makes grading in Premiere Pro far more attractive than before.

 

R Neil Haugen Written by:

Neil is a contributor to MixingLight, a subscription tutorial/eduacational service for professional video post-processing professionals specializing in color corrections. He is also an Adobe Community Professional specializing in the video apps, particularly Premiere Pro, and within that, color and graphics. He has also given online presentations on the creation and use of "Mogrts" (Motion Graphics Templates) in Adobe Premiere Pro and AfterEffects, and was a proofreader for Jarle Leirpoll's ebook "Making MOGRTS: Creating Motion Graphics in Adobe AfterEffects". With over 40 years in professional imaging production, photography, and video work, Neil has received numerous awards including the Master Photographer and Craftsman degrees from the Professional Photographers of America.

3 Comments

  1. Miriam Haugen
    April 7, 2018
    Reply

    This is great!

  2. Dean
    April 22, 2018
    Reply

    Hi Neil, thanks for posting this. I’ve been following your blog for a few weeks & trying your Lumetri colour grading workflow.

    It really works & I’m getting some great results on footage that I’d previously given up on grading in Premiere Pro. Because the workflow I was using meant the footage usually resulted in slight improvement after hours of grading. Or looked worse which meant the grading had to scrapped & I had to start over again or leave it as is.

    Adobe should include your tutorial in their getting started instructions because, to be honest, I was on the verge of ditching Premiere Pro & moving to Resolve. Especially as it’s now at version 15. It was only the learning curve of moving to Resolve that delayed the move. From Googling tutorials & reading forums it seems a lot of users are frustrated with Lumetri and view it as a poor relation to Resolve when it comes to serious grading work.

    I have a friend who shoots & grades with Black Magic and he swears by Resolve. And I have to admit the results he’s getting are impressive.

    I’d like to train and develop pro-level grading skills. So my question is, & I understand it’s a personal choice. But am I wasting my time by investing it in Lumetri? Or is Resolve in a completely different league when it comes to colour grading, so it would be better to train on that platform?

    Thanks again for this great blog!

    • R Neil Haugen
      November 6, 2018
      Reply

      Sorry to be so late in replying!

      Resolve is the big daddy of grading, no question … I do some in it, and have some colorist friends who are professionally ‘based’ in that program. That said, with this version of Premiere Pro that came out in late October of 2018, the “2019” 13.x series of builds, Lumetri is both faster and easier to use and far more powerful.

      The two biggies are the ability to ‘layer’ Lumetri via a drop-down box at the top of the panel, creating and naming layers for different parts of the grading job, and the wonderful new curves in the Curves tab.

      Being able to easily split the work into “layers”, each with a name for the type of work done in that layer, is a fantastic organization uptick. And production tool. They’ve adapted the behind-the-scene processing so first, it only ‘uses’ resources for the controls you touch (used to work as if you’d touched every control!) which was a boost in processing speed for both playback & exporting worthwhile of it’s own, and they’ve completely re-done the code so it’s a lot faster in general.

      Then the rebuilt Curves tab features five new Curves in a very easily used layout. The standard Hue vs Sat curve, grab a hue and move up, more of it, down … less. But that is just one. You can use the Hue vs Hue to sat grab some skin tones that are a bit red or yellow, and move them into the proper place. The Sat vs Luma replaces (for me) having to make a Secondary to roll off saturation in the bottom quarter of the image and the top 10% which both mimics film better and concentrates the eye into the mids/upper mids where so much of the important detail lies. And other curves! I’ve never been a big curves user … but that tab is making me go to Curves as a main if not almost my main tool anymore. I’ve even remapped my Elements control panel to use one of the balls/rings combo as a mouse to get the exact speed of action I want while adjusting those curves!

      And remember: material edited in Premiere Pro and then graded in Resolve involves that extensive dance of the “conform” process to get the project out of PrPro, into Resolve, then back to PrPro. Being able to stay in PrPro can save the hours one could spend in that conform process. Which is no small deal.

      For long-form and say full TV broadcast material, I’d still say go to Resolve. For smaller projects and web stuff … probably stay in Lumetri. I’ve got a YouTube on using the new curves that I just realized I haven’t linked here … I need to take care of that tomorrow! But … it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r5uIIUpgt0&t=4s

      Neil

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