I’ve been busy working up video tutorials and articles about working with color in Premiere Pro over at MixingLight, a colorist’s subscription website. Including this one, which is published “outside” the paywall and so available to all. So sadly I’ve not been getting more content added here over the last couple months. But as I’m getting in the swing of things, I’ll be getting back to adding more content here on a regular basis.
But at the moment … Adobe has just released Premiere Pro 2019 … the 13.1 update. I have to comment on this as there’s more to it than may appear at first glance.
Some nifty new tools added!
The 13.1 update to the 2019/13.x version of the Premiere Pro program has some nifty new tools and a TON of bug-fixes. No, they didn’t hit all of my noted bugs, but they got a lot. And they added a few spiffy new tools, a couple that have game-changing significance for workflows.
Freeform View
The first one I’ll mention … is the “Freeform View” of the Project panel. Okay, at first it doesn’t sound like all that much. So, you can move around thumbs and resize them, big deal.
Well … actually … it is a big deal. Why? This isn’t just awesome for visually organizing your project … it’s a great tool for planning out color correction workflows. Here is a link to a short Adobe video showing Freeform at work …
You can say make a group of the clips in a scene, shown in a bin. Then not only move them around according to an order through the scene, you can move them around by whether they ‘fit’ for visual feel or contrast. You can see which clips will flow clip-to-clip, and which clips will need work to become visually part of the rest of the scene. Adjusting your thumb-size individually or for groups, even dramatically differently per clip, as whatever works best for you.
Form groups of clips that will need the same corrections. Stack/overlay clips within groups to regain monitor space for working the rest of the bin. This is a very good tool for getting an overview of the color correction/grading job as the media comes to you.
Rulers, Guides, and Auto-Resizing Graphics!
The next part I’ll highlight are a couple tools that really work to enhance graphics work. With them, making mogrts, the Motion Graphics Templates, has become a lot easier and faster.
Premiere … FINALLY! … has rulers and guides! Yes, like Photoshop and Illustrator, Premiere finally has RULERS for the Program monitor. Click on the wrench icon in the lower right corner of the Program Monitor, then “Show Rulers” and “Show Guides”. Rulers appear at the left side and top of the Program monitor. Click in the ruler, drag out across the monitor, and you set guides.
To set them in a precise place, just right-click on a guide, and you can type in the pixel location for that guide. You can even save guide templates as shown in this Adobe video. They come with “snap” for both text and graphics elements, making it a breeze to load up a guides preset you’ve made, create text/graphics and move them to perfect alignment.
The second new tool … is in the text editing section of the Essential Graphics panel. A new option … “Background”. Doesn’t sound like all that much, but it certainly is!
So many of our text blocks are set off by a surrounding graphics box, and we’ve had to make those separately, and try and tie them to the text. BUT … if more letters were added or the font changed, we’d have to resize and move the underlying graphics box.
NO MORE! Simply type in your starting text, then go down to the area with the “Fill”, “Stroke” … and “Background” option. Click the background option and set the color, opacity, and size. The really spiffy thing? That size is relative to the text as it “is” at the moment. Add text for a longer line, the box gets longer. With the same size difference to the text on all four sides as before.
Basic lower thirds … credits … all sorts of things are much faster and easier to create and to place both precisely in the monitor and aligned with each other now.
You can even add multiple strokes … quite a few if you’re so inclined.
Content Aware Fill in AfterEffects
And there is one other handy tool … though it is in AfterEffects. With the moniker of “Content Aware Fill”. If you’ve done much in Photoshop, you’ve heard of or used it. Now, it’s in AfterEffects, and though not perfect … is an amazing tool added to the arsenal. Adobe of course has a little video about it.
This is going to get a LOT more of us spending more time in AfterEffects. For good reason.
Now, there are other things like more audio track “types” have the option for auto-ducking under dialogue, tracking masks is much faster, thankfully … and Premiere and Audition are more in tune with each other … pun intended. Audition has a new “punch and roll” capability for voice-over corrections. AfterEffects has a much needed modernization to the scripting, including error-checking that actually works, making that “scary” part of AfterEffects far more approachable by the novice, and far faster for the experienced ones among us.
In all, not a lot of “wow” features, but a lot of improvements to the basic video post workflow process. And … here’s the “Overview” video from Adobe of the 13.1 changes.
NAB 2O19
If you’re going to Las Vegas for NAB 2019, April 7-11, pop me an email to rneilphotog@gmail.com and see if we can meet up sometime! I’ll be teaching in the Flanders/MixingLight booth several times, and spending some time with the Adobe folks I work with regularly behind Adobe’s big booth. I’ll be at the Colorist Mixer Sunday evening the 6th, MMB or Media Motion Ball and the Adobe party on Monday the 7th, Faster Together on Tuesday, and the MOBeer event on Wednesday … among other things. It’s going to be a very busy NAB for me, and I hope to see you there!
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