The engineering team for Adobe Premiere Pro not only revamped their subtitles/captions process to make it better. They added something no other NLE (non-linear editor) application has: auto-transcription.

What is that? Say your project is a scene with dialog or an interview. Something with dialog. You simply go to the Captions workspace, and in the Text panel, select “Transcribe Sequence”. It uploads the soundtrack to an automatic service to create written text from speech. You get a time-passing bar. And then the transcription simply appears in that panel.

You can edit the transcription, right in that panel. Or if you’d rather edit the captions in place on the timeline, tell it to “Create Captions”. And Premiere Pro creates a captions/subtitle track above the normal video tracks on the timeline, and places your subtitles or captions there for you.

A Speed Demon on Steroids!

It is quick and easy. It does a pretty good job. But you will need to do some editing. And it does take a bit of practice to figure out why it works the way it does, How to give a style or feel to the results.

I needed to test the new process thoroughly. And of course, to get comfortable with it. Get my speed up. So I went back to a few old abandoned interview projects in our archives. Projects that never got done. I had enough media there for some good practicing and pushing.

Why didn’t those projects get done? They were interview jobs. Projects that were well intentioned. But we realized they were going to take a lot of editing time. And organizational time. All editing choices needed to be based on the words being spoken. We would have to sit and watch all the clips. Make subclips. Drag/drop from a rough-cut to selects sequences.

Re-listen to the text. Adjust. Trim or add. Rearrange the clips. Very fussy time-stealing work.

But the projects weren’t really important enough to justify the time they would need to finish. And they were sent to the Archives to die. Or perhaps, go into stasis.

But I brought some of those old project media clips back into new projects in my 2021 Productions. And got to work. This is what the Captions Workspace Text panel looks like with the sequence already transcribed.

As you can see, the text is shown as blocks of words with formatting available. Double-click a block to edit it. Any changes you make are simultaneously made in the blocks on the timeline.

The Captions Workspace

This is Captions Workspace. The Text panel is in the upper left panel group, the subtitles show as the yellow blocks above the timeline. And the controls for stylizing are on the right. And they are nearly the same as used in the Essential Graphics workspace and panel.

The yellow blocks above the timeline are the captions blocks. They show the text on them if the timeline is expanded enough. You can select a block and physically move it. You can use edit tools to lengthen or shorten a block.

If the cursor shows the red bar with double-facing arrows, you move that edit point. It will either leave a gap to the right or over-write into the next space.

If the cursor shows the yellow bar with one-sided arrows you are moving that edit point and all blocks past that.

And you can use the formatting tools on the far right to position your text on screen. Set font type and color. Add strokes. Shadows. And of course save as a preset that can be selected for a current timeline or for a new sequence.

Here’s a link to our Creativity-Hive Facebook page, to a stream where I demonstrated this process to Miriam …

Creativity-Hive: Speed to Text Transcription in Premiere Pro

The Day the Universe Changed

Well now … this is The Day the Universe Changed! That’s a title from a TV show that our family used to love. With a fascinating narrator who went through various events and ideas, showing how those ideas, those events, changed the human universe.

Some seemingly very small things led to massive changes in how we humans live. And it is a very appropriate phrase for what this auto-transcribe has meant for my business. My passion.

I had been “merely” grateful the Adobe DVA team was working on a new captions process. The old one was horrible and I didn’t even want to work with it. But I didn’t expect this much benefit. This much sheer joy of the new tools.

And suddenly, those old projects, just brought back to test this new subtitles process, have been given new life. They were a drudgery to work on. But now, they’re a joy. Easy. Obvious. Direct choices can be made in moments. This makes editing interviews and dialog a total breeze. Slick.

We’re back at work on several long-archived projects. Because now they are easy and a joy to do!

And I’ve discovered the new captions/subtitles process is by far the most massive change and improvement to my editing and video-post processing workflow.

EVER.

My video-post “universe” truly has changed. And here’s a link to Adobe’s “Help” system explaining the new process.

Captions Workflow in Premiere Pro | Adobe

The post A Really Big Deal appeared first on rNeilphotog.

That title better sums up what I do now. And I’ll bring that page “public” pretty soon. But for today, I’ll add on here.

I’ll include here a short embedded vid I did this week. A young cousin’s hubby has a really hot 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger body. That’s all that is from a Dodge Dart however! And that body houses an amazing motor, frame, and safety construction. No Dart ever came outta the factory with an aluminum block! He runs it in the “Outlaw 10.5” category, and it is a very fast car. I wanted to see it in action. So they invited me to come for last weekend’s races at the Woodburn Dragstrip.

Unfortunately, he broke his very expensive and awesome motor on the run he made just as I got there. As in blew TWO holes in the aluminum block. But he wasn’t dismayed. I think he likes working on it better than driving it!

But I wanted some more footage, and so I shot around the various “pits” where people worked on their cars, And I shot quite a few ‘runs’ during the late afternoon and into the evening.

I’m including the ‘final’ of one of the runs here. And then of course, I’ll tell how I got there from the original media.

A BMPCC4K plus Moza Air 2 Gimbal

It was my first shot at using my BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k (BMPCC4K) on my new Moza Air 2 gimbal. Which is a fair amount of weight fully kitted out for gimbal work without even an extra monitor or external mics. But I was able to be up very close to the track and the cars. And got a LOT of practice at fast panning.

The clip I finished off and show here is of Doug Lyons’ around ’69 Camaro. His was the space next to my cousin’s in the entrant’s working/living area. A very nice guy, awesome grandkids there … and holy schmolly his Camaro moves!

Color Correction

It took a LOT of work though to prep. Color of course including using Lumetri’s Basic, Creative, Curves, and Wheels tabs. Um, when don’t I use all of those?

This was shot in the BRAW “film” mode of my BMPCC4K, which is a Log format. I normally use the excellent Autokroma BRAW plugin for handling the transform to Rec.709. But decided this time to simply use the Lumetri panel for everything.

This is Log, right? So on first viewing it’s very “flat” … no dark shadows, nothing near a white, and very little color. All the data for those are “there”, but it’s not apparent until the image is either transformed with a LUT or other transform process. Or manually “sculpted” as I did here.

Basic Beginnings

Starting with the Basic tab, I upped the color temp a bit, and the tint, then upped Exposure a bit to lift the general upper ‘mids’. Working on my Tangent Elements panel was huge. I can move several controls at once. And work them against each other. So I was also working with the Shadows, Contrast, Highlights, and Whites controls all together. Working to get this pretty close to what looked good for tonal visuals and scopes.

It did take some further tweaking of black point using the Wheels ‘Shadows’ control. Which is a straight “Lift” control by function. But on that Elements panel, it was a short bit of work.

I added some Saturation and Vibrance with the Creative tab controls. But I could not get as much color in as I wanted without getting a lot of excursions past the boundaries of the Vectorscope. So off to the HSL Curves section of the Curves tab.

Throwing Some Curves

The first thing I did in the HSL Curves was to emphasize primaries … blues, reds, greens upped in the Hue v Sat curve. Then a slight correction to the blues. That was all-important here, as the car appeared slightly more cyan than it should be. So that involved the Hue v Hue control.

Then in the Luma v Sat curve, dropping of saturation in the upper third of the box (far right side). That included the light bulbs of the “Christmas tree”. And I needed to bring them back in-bounds when looking at the Vectorscope in YUV.

But it still needed more “colorfulness.” So I went to the Sat v Sat curve, and rolled off the top half steadily but heavily. This way I could go back to the Saturation and Vibrance controls and push the lower saturated colors. This gets more color everywhere without any out-of-bounds excursion or “blooming”.

And that was it. I did think of doing a secondary for the sky, to darken it some. But that would realistically take making a track matte effect “stack”. Duplicating the clip on V2 and V3, then applying the Track Matte Effect on the clip on V2 set to pull the Luma from V3. Then setting the Lumetri on V3 with a mask and Secondary selection to only show the sky values.

Then you would go to Lumetri ‘below’ the Track Matte effect on V3, and can use any control you want. It will magically appear in the selected area on the V1 clip, which is the one you actually “see”. But I decided the extra time and work really aren’t needed on this clip.

Audio

Remember I was working on a gimbal, right? And it was the first time out with the new gimbal. So I chose not to use any of my several mics and simply turned down the in-cam Left/Right mics so they weren’t clipping when the cars roared out.

Then there was a LOT of work to get this to sound “real” and relatively clean. Starting with the Audio Track Mixer for things that would affect the whole timeline, then doing specific clip work.

Track Mixer setup included the Parametric EQ effect in the top Effects slot for the track, Set to ‘lift’ the low frequencies substantially around 60-130 Hz, and another peak around 1800 Hz as that lifted the announcer’s sound and clarified it.

Then the Dynamics Processing effect. I like this effect’s controls as I can see how I’m sculpting the sound.

Anything on the straight line from lower left to upper right is left “as was”. Any place you add a control point and move is changed. You can see the effect. And it lists the actual hard numbers below.

First … I brought the upper-right end of the control line down to -8dB, Then added a control point and brought the sound “below” that well up, as you can see the nearly flattened line out to the second control point from the top. What had been at -30dB was now at -18dB.

I added another ‘lift’ control point to bring up a bit more of the lower sounds, then added a final point to bring the low-volume sounds back to the original values.

This is where hearing and seeing go hand in hand.

A last bit was balancing the L/R. The camera was set for the same settings on both channels. But the Left was a little less than the Right. So I fixed that between the Track Mixer’s Pan control and the track audio in the Effects Control Panel.

A Visual Tweak

You may note a bit of “zoom” during the run. I shot this in UHD and planned to use a 1080p timeline. So it was very easy and clean to ‘zoom’ in as the cars sped away. Yet maintain sharpness.

I did need to do a small amount of noise reduction/sharpening, with both set for low values. And I think, in all, it worked out pretty well.

With a good sized screen, and large good quality speakers, you can really get the feel of the track.

A Grafx Funnery!

Just for the fun of it, I made a little final credit for myself at the end. It uses Roland Kahlenberg’s typeGems2 mogrt plugin for the graphics image. And some sound from one of the drag races of the day. It took me around five minutes to come up with this using that spiffy set of options in typeGems2.

Used In This Post:

BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4k

Moza Air 2 Gimbal

Tangent Elements Control Surface

The post Transitions are always a thing! appeared first on rNeilphotog.

Adobe graphics engineer James Strawn recently compiled an amazing chart. It shows the COMPLETE list of available keyboard shortcuts for mogrts or any graphics in Premiere. And I’ve tested these specifically with the “mogrts” used from or created by the Essential Graphics Panel. This is a major jump in mogrt/graphics productivity!

Very few shortcuts seemed to work with the Essential Graphics Panel when it first appeared a couple versions back. While the old Titler still had a lot of keyboard shortcuts listed, at least seemingly, only for it. That was a chief complaint from many experienced graphics editors way back then about the Essential Graphics Panel and mogrts in general. Why was this such a big thing?

Fiddly Fidgety!

Graphics work requires a very precise, very picky control of placement, sizing, and all other details such as kerning and leading. Quick font changes. Aligning a text and graphic element. Moving things on-screen to precise locations.

Using a mouse to make multiple clicks in various spots of the User Interface (UI) is dramatically slower than tapping a couple quick keys. Any experienced editor uses keyboard shortcuts for most regular editing functions. Many of us also use “button boxes” … tools like the X-keys XK-60, the Streamdeck XL, or a gamer’s device like the Razer Orbweaver Chroma that I use. These can add macro capabilities (sequential actions in one tap!) and organization to your shortcut use.

Tapping is SO much faster than slide-click, slide – right-click … slide … yuck.

Tap Away!

But over time, the Adobe graphics engineers have made nearly all the graphics keyboard shortcuts work with any graphic element, or created ones specifically for the EGP and mogrts. I hadn’t even noticed the changes, to tell the truth!

But this new list shows the depth and breadth of actions that are already set to a keyboard shortcut, or are available for the user to create their own keyboard shortcuts for. And if it doesn’t include everything I’d like a keyboard shortcut for, it’s pretty close.

What Can Keyboard Shortcuts Do?

Oh my … to start with, you can add a new rectangle or ellipse shape from a quick tap … add fonts from Adobe fonts … upgrade a graphic on the timeline to a Master Graphic … replace fonts … add layers … align or distribute text … move layers forward or back … show or add rulers and guides … nudge selected items by one or five pixels … select text styles from Regular, Faux bold/italic/caps or sub/superscipt … and now even … underline!

Increase or decrease leading, font size, or kerning by one or five pixels … left/right/center alignment of text within a box … set intro end and outro start … highlight a word or a line … and of course clear the selection.

There are more … but to see them, look through the list. Add them into your workflow, and you will soon be working both faster and more precisely!

Neil

The post Motion Graphics Keyboard Shortcuts for Premiere Pro 2020 appeared first on rNeilphotog.

Premiere Pro 2020 has brought a lot of speed to the creation and modification of motion graphics (mogrts) by making a ton of keyboard shortcuts available. I’ve got another post about the complete list of graphics keyboard shortcuts here. But for creating glorious text, I’ve seen nothing like the creation of easy text animation with typeGEMs vII in Premiere Pro.

Creator Roland Kahlenberg is a very experienced and capable AfterEffects wizard. And he is pretty good at Premiere Pro also. He created Version 2 of his typeGEMs plugin for both programs. typeGems vII makes it easy to animate text movements and even the color of the text. And it does so in ways not available from within Premiere Pro.

Why would we want a plugin like this? Can’t we do this “manually” without buying something? Yes, of course. IF you’re capable and comfortable in a working knowledge of text effects work in AfterEffects. I work enough with AfterEffects that yes, I could with some time spent re-create anything available in typeGEMS vII.

It would take hours though! Why in the world would any of us choose to spend that much time for one mogrt? This plugin gives us a ton of easy text animation. And without having to leave Premiere for the deeps of AfterEffects.

Easy Text Animation in Glorious Color!

There are 90 text animation presets, and 25 Looks presets. For every preset, you have many options to use if you wish to modify them. From animating single characters to animating words. Inertial bounce … ease in/out … random selection even! Gradients, auto-tracking … so many different “properties” available with a click or slide of a mouse.

Simply spend a few minutes watching his tutorials or mine … and play with it. This plugin uses a TON of heavy AfterEffects tools in the background. But for the user, this is amazingly easy text animation with a few simple but powerful controls!

This nifty graphic took only a couple minutes to create.

Getting Started …

When you buy typeGEMs vII, you install it as any other mogrt in your computer. I would recommend to a “local folder”. To use it, simply type “typegems” into the search field of the Essential Graphics (EGP) panel’s Browse tab, then drag/drop the “bGEMs – typeTEMs V2” item onto your timeline panel. Click on the graphic chip in the Timeline if it isn’t already selected. Then go to the EGP’s Edit tab and begin working.

Hit the “T” key to go into Text mode with the cursor, then either click/drag to set a “bounding box” for your text … or just click and start typing. After you have a few characters or words, start going through options to test out the various features and tools.

The various options may be confusing at first, so you might start by going to his page of on-site tutorials for typeGEMs.

Here’s a sampling he did of presets …

I was thrilled to do a tutorial on using the Gradient tab for this very fun and handy plugin.

So … here it is!

Roland’s amazing plugin hasn’t received nearly the attention it has earned. There is no other tool available that gives such easy text animation yet invokes so many heavy AfterEffects effects.

typeGEMs vII is one of several tools that Roland has created. He also has some excellent tutorials on a variety of techniques for AfterEffects and Premiere. I recommend going to his website broadcastgems.com to check out his other offerings.

typeGEMs V2 is available here.

A bit more about Roland … his “brief” bio:

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations;
BorisFX/Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor & Adobe After Effects CC (Certified Expert & Certified Instructor); and Adobe Community Professional (ACP).

The post Revisited: Easy Text animation with typegems vii appeared first on rNeilphotog.

This post is a look at using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading. Is it a professional color correction monitor? Or at least usable for the wild-wild web?

I have more than 40 years of working with professional color standards for delivery to paying clients. There is a reason the standards exist: without them, all is chaos. Well, even with them, there’s still a lot of chaos! However you do have a leg to stand on, and a solid one at that, if your setup is properly color managed.

Standards … And Color Management … Matter!

So need to plan your color management system before you sit down to do any color/tonal corrective work. Only then can you know how your work will compare, on a proper system, to other professionally done work. Work done to “The Standard”. And the standard you need to comply with is the broadcast standards used for nearly all professional video work.

Can a monitor like the BenQ PD2720U stand up to the full standards of the broadcast world? Probably not. If you need to pass the muster of the heartless QC machines of network or streaming services. The standards for professional color correction monitors are very high.

Pro Broadcast Reference Monitors

Choosing a reference monitor is a HUGE part of the process of establishing a color management system. I work with professional colorists all the time. The guys & gals working broadcast, satellite, and film work. They do live or die financially by network QC standards. For them, a Flanders or Eizo monitor is pretty much required.

The cheapest current Flanders is a 1920×1080 Rec.709, 21.5″ screen selling for $1995. NOT including the SDI cables and the external BlackMagic or AJA boxes you will also want to ‘feed’ the proper signal to that monitor.

Most pro colorists need 10-bit however, and a bit more than a 21.5″ screen. So … you’re now looking at $4,000 or more for the monitor alone. And if you want a larger screen, 10-bit, and HDR … well, you’ve jumped to $20,000 and up.

Web-based video work doesn’t tend to pay the bills for that kind of gear. So what is a person to do? My business partner for all these years simply won’t go “there” for a nice 24″ 1920×1080 Flanders, let alone the larger 4K rigs. It isn’t a practical business solution for my clientele from any financial view.

Working For Web-Use in the Real World

This is where trade-offs become required. But going in, you need to know what you’re trading off for that lower price tag. What can you give up and still do good quality work for the web? What limits do those choices place on the work you can accept? And what should you tell your clients if they mention any possibility of broadcast use at a future time?

But remember throughout this article, that my personal standards are measured by what I’ve seen on Flanders and Eizo screens costing several times what most any “normal” computer monitor will cost!

So even coming close to my “goal” is a major achievement for any computer monitor. And my goal is simply a perfect gamma (tone) curve for the 2.4 gamma that I use, and a DeltaE chart of variance from ‘perfect’ color hues for pro-video standard video sRGB/Rec.709, that is never higher than the dE/2.2 that is the basis for professional colorist work.

These are the base standards of the Flanders/Eizo professional color correction monitors. Both of those goals are well above the vast majority of computer monitors out there, and until fairly recently, at most any price.

What am I willing … or required … to give up? At any lower price level than for the professional color correction monitors, you simply can’t get screens with the absolute evenness of pixel tones and hues. Edge to edge. Nor do you get the ability to load calibration LUTs into the monitor.

I can get by with a very close pixel color/tonal evenness across the screen. And I can get by with manually doing my color calibrations. I’m rather experienced with using the Xrite i1 Display Pro puck/software in “advanced mode. And with running a profile to check and verify that calibration using the Lightspace color profiling software in conjunction with BlackMagic Resolve.

So I was looking around for a monitor to test … and if it met my needs … to acquire.

BenQ has come out with a new series of “DesignVue Designer” monitors, designed for video use and claiming fairly high-end color accuracy. They supplied one for me to test and evaluate in real-world working conditions in my shop. I tested it both as it came out of the box, and after running a whole series of calibration runs with slightly different settings in the monitor and i1 Display Pro software.

And after every calibration, I ran a profile using the combination of Lightspace/Resolve.

After initial testing and full setup, I feel the BenQ PD2720U will work very well when in an appropriate viewing environment. And as with any other monitor, only when they are properly calibrated and profiled. This is again, intended for web-based end-use color correction.

BenQ PD2720U

This monitor is called a PD2720U, and is designed primarily for video color correction and viewing. It is accurately listed as “4k UHD” which is 3840×2160, compared to “4k DCI” or full pro-broadcast/theater 4k, which is 4096×2160. The measured screen diagonal is right at 27″. Image width/height are 23.5″x 13.4″.

And right off the bat, one huge advantage of this monitor for video work compared to any other computer monitor I’ve owned is the marvelous range of screen frequencies this can work with! For video work, you want that reference monitor refresh rate set to the same frame-rate as your media, or if not that, to double it. This monitor has 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 5o, 59, and 60 Hz refresh rates available. Very useful. And showing this is definitely conceived for video post processing work.

It is IPS with an LED backlight, and for color calibration work they suggest using the ‘RGB LED’ settings for profile generation. In testing, it comes pretty close to the listed Max Brightness rating of 350 nits (or cd/m2), and is listed as having 10 bit color. (Naturally for Rec.709, the only brightness I need is up to 100 nits.)

They list this monitor as covering 100% of Rec.709 and 96% of P3 color space, a larger color space than the long-time video standard of video sRGB/Rec.709. It has internal modes for DCI-P3 (theater P3), Display-P3 (Mac Retina standard), Adobe RGB, Rec.709, CAD/CAM, Animation, Low Blue Light, Darkroom (intended for video corrections in darkened suites), M-book, DICOM, and User (settable by the user). All can be quickly changed via the dongle that has it’s own port into the monitor. It can be set for gamma from 1.8 through 2.6.

They also list this as having “HDR 10 content support”, meaning it can “read” the HDR 10 media that is starting to get distributed. Realistically, for HDR creation you would need a monitor capable of supporting the wider gamut color space used in HDR work (which this can) but at something well above 600 nits, so this isn’t really designed for HDR creation work.

It has Thunderbolt3 and USB3.1 pass-throughs, and 2 HDMI inputs plus a Display-Port input. And a simple and elegant stand … very nicely designed!

With all the inputs and the very useful Thunderbolt3 and USB3.1 pass-throughs, and that wonderfully practical stand, it was very easy to add to my setup as a third monitor. And with the very handy and useful dongle/puck with a center rotating/push-knob with five surrounding buttons, setting … and setting up! … this monitor was very easy and fast.

Like most editor/colorist types whether web or broadcast, 99% of my work is still Rec.709, so that is my main concern. It has several built-in options for different display color spaces, and a dongle that is very handy to use to change the current screen space and settings.

I will cover the full details of properly evaluating and setting up a monitor in my next post. For now, I can say I’m quite pleased.

Using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading

I did a series of test profiles of the manufacturer settings using my i1 Display Pro Puck and the Lightspace calibration software coupled to Davinci Resolve.

Then I did a full setup and calibration on my own of the “User” mode, setting every for full broadcast standards. Video sRGB, Rec.709, gamma 2.4, at 100 nits max brightness. After that full setup and calibration, I created a profile generated again by my i1 Display Pro puck, and Lightspace calibration software combined with Resolve. The results of the full setup when profiled were quite pleasing.

This unit has a nearly dead-on gamma curve with only a very, very slight deviation up in the mid-highlights. And a DeltaE graph for color accuracy that was well under the ‘visible level’ standard of 2.2, with the only exception a very narrow small spike to 2.8 in the Red channel in the very, very darkest area. Visually … insignificant.

The screen is visually quite even (very good for a monitor of this price range) and I’m not seeing any problems with reflections or ghosting or other visual disturbances. Note, I’m in a “proper” middle-gray room with low light levels, using a MediaLight bias light on the back of the monitor. That light is metered and set to light the neutral gray wall behind the monitor to 10% of the monitor’s bright-white level, all according to broadcast standards.

For anyone viewing my video output on the web, this should “nail” the Rec.709 standard. I am quite comfortable with the results I can get.

So yes, I’m very, very pleased with this BenQ PD2720U monitor. I’ll be adding a detailed, full tech review soon, including more shots of my setup and video of this in use. And quite a number of the Lightspace profile charts for reference. That post will demonstrate how to go about testing and setting up a reference monitor for web work.

Using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading

Understand, I don’t currently consider this the equivalent of a full broadcast reference monitor. And I would be hesitant to send something out to a network system’s Quality Control (QC) machine for checking. But if your clientele is based in the wild-wild-web (like mine), it should work beautifully. Or, if you are in a professional environment and need a very close approximation of the screen the colorist will see, this should work quite well for you at a cost that is well below even the cheapest full broadcast reference monitor.

And after I work with it a bit more, I’ll be sending some graded material and tests on to Pat Inhofer and Robbie Carman of Mixinglight.com to test, and report how close I keep within broadcast needs using this monitor for my Reference work. I know it will work for the web … how close is it for broadcast? I don’t know. They will. And they’ve got the gear to test my results.

How close can I come to full broadcast with this monitor? I don’t know. It will do beautifully for my work for the web. And … well, it’s a very good purchase for web-based work. An excellent choice for professional editing with a full colorist suite available for final color.

Neil

Note: the gear visible in this suite are three monitors, the BenQ PD2720U “up top” as Reference monitor, over a main UI monitor, LG Ultrawide 2560×1080, with a Dell Ultrasharp U2312HM on the left. The Tangent Elements panel is my main grading control surface. And a Wacom Intuos III pen-tablet is still chugging along, with a Razer Orbweaver Chroma for macro and other button-use. In the lower right corner, you can even see the Rode SVM Video Mic on stand used for in-suite video recording.

The post BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading? appeared first on rNeilphotog.

This is the accurate and “engineer approved” information on Adobe Premiere Pro’s color management processes, settings, and monitor settings. Yes, it’s different from most mythology “out there”. But … it’s accurate!

Premiere is in reality a very tightly color managed app. This shocks many users. How can it be tightly color managed when there aren’t any settings? Because … it works very differently than most users expect,

Think of the options in say Photoshop, which has an entire dialog box of settings for all sorts of things. Resolve has a long dialog with tons of settings. Premiere doesn’t. And they don’t have any real definite documentation on color management either. So h0w can it be a fully color-managed application?

It’s all in the design of the program. Engineering hardwiring! The engineering code is all set for a full-on broadcast standard operation. And for users that just “know” to setup their entire system including monitors for those broadcast standards. They just don’t really talk about it anywhere. Which … is a problem, isn’t it?

Get the full details on MixingLight.com!

I made a presentation on Premiere’s color management in the scheduled talks in the Flanders/MixingLight booth at NAB. I had a ton of help to prep for that presentation. And also for the full video tutorial we made for MixingLight.com’s subscription service, Senior Product Manager Patrick Palmer assigned color engineer Francis Crossman to answer any questions I had, and he’s been a wonderful resource.

[Editing note: Francis Crossman has been promoted to Co-Product Manager for Premiere!]

But Francis had to go into their engineering notes to find the specific answer for many of my detailed questions. Neither the Adobe program staff nor I thought that ideal. They provided all the information I wanted and needed. I am very grateful for the help.

I have been in the studio filming and re-filming that tutorial. It seems almost constantly since NAB in April. But additional questions kept popping up. Francis thought of a few things to add or clarify. Pat Inhofer and Robbie Carman of MixingLight had further questions, And they wanted very tight clarity on even how some things are stated because there is so much confusion and mythology “out there”.

So it’s been shoot a section. Upload for review. Then reshoot. One single video tutorial became two, as there is so much to cover for basic setup and operation that the different setup required for HDR operation became its own program.

And this needed to be tightly specced technically and both complete and clear in prose. Because this has so much material that has never published before, and certainly never all in one place … this first part of the two-parter on basic setup and SDR (standard dynamic range) color management will be outside their paywall for the entire industry to use.

https://mixinglight.com/color-tutorial/demystifying-premiere-pros-color-management-and-finishing-pipeline/

Simplicity Can Be Spendy!

The color management system that is used within Premiere is in some ways simplicity itself. It is built entirely to be used on a system with monitors set to video sRGB, profiled to Rec.709 at gamma-2,4, and with a max brightness of 100 nits. The internal monitors and the “Transmit Out” feature are all hardwired for use on systems and monitors set to those specs. Period.

So the user must set their system up for any “confidence” monitor to be set according to those full-on broadcast standards. It all works very nicely. On my calibrated and profiled system, what I see within Premiere and for the same clip within Resolve in RCM mode (Resolve Color Management) is identical.

This is a problem of course for the newer Macs with Apple’s new and intriguing color space, “P3-Display”. If you have a Mac with a P3 monitor, and you’ve not set that to the predecessor P3 video spaces, P3 Theater and P3 Cinema, try the user preference to “enable display color management”. That option tries to display a proper video-sRGB/Rec.709/gamma-2.4 image within Premiere’s monitors on a P3-Display screen. It can’t fix then trying to view that in most players on that screen, but … the material may be more accurate when seen on other broadcast set screens.

And for HDR … there are only two devices that can get the image signal correctly out of Premiere and into a properly setup, calibrated and profiled HDR monitor. One external box for Macs, and one internal PCIe card for PCs. They are both … a chunk of change.

But at this time, any decent HDR monitor is a chunk of change also!

Come On Over!

Head over to Mixinglight.com to get the full tutorial and details. It will be worth your time! And … yea, there’s a lot more covered in the full pair of tutorials.

Neil

The post Demystifying Color Management in Adobe Premiere appeared first on rNeilphotog.

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!

The post pREMIERE 2019/13.1 reLEASED! appeared first on rNeilphotog.

I have just become a regular contributor to MixingLight, a subscription learning website for professional video post-processing specialists in color correction, tonality, and general image “feel” and quality. My first assigned specialty will be a series of video tutorials on using the Premiere Pro Lumetri panel and other image tools for a production colorist workflow.

As time goes by, I will be tackling other projects “over there”, and am pleased to be asked to join their impressive international staff of contributors

As this first Insight of mine is available to all, not restricted to their subscribers only, anyone is welcome to view:

MixingLight.com

rNeil adds … rNeil VideoGrafx!

Very soon, I will be “featuring” a new website name/location reflecting the direction my business and teaching work is going. Obviously this site has been doing video post-processing rather than still-image work. rNeil VideoGrafx will be featuring that direction, and including my work with Adobe’s Motion Graphics Templates, or “mogrts”.

And this site will actually start showing still photographic images, tools, and techniques.

Neil

The post Growth and Change! appeared first on rNeilphotog.

I know I’m using a lot of exclamation points there, but this is HUGE!

Adobe and Apple have finally reached agreement on bringing native encoding/exporting of the Apple ProRes codec to all users of Premiere Pro CC 2019 version as of this latest update of Premiere Pro.

As shown in the pic above, in the Export dialog, select the QuickTime format, then in the Preset line, select the version of ProRes for your needs. Simple and spiffy!

You can of course also create proxy and other presets in Adobe Media Encoder to use within Premiere Pro also that use the various flavors of ProRes.

Apple has always been unwilling to share their in-house ProRes codec on the Windows OS without purchase of a rather spendy license, which has also often not even been available. This agreement is going to be such a huge benefit to the entire video post-processing world. Standardization of formats and codecs is such a huge boost!

Thank you, Apple and Adobe!

The post Pro-Res comes to pc’s! appeared first on rNeilphotog.

Why would we want a plugin like this? Can’t we do this “manually” without buying something? Yes, of course. IF you’re capable of text and effects work in AfterEffects. I work enough with AfterEffects that yes, I can with some time spent re-create anything available in typeGEMS vII.

But … it would take far more time than just using this quick and powerful plugin. There are 90 text animation presets, and 25 Looks presets. For every preset, you have many options to use if you wish to modify them. From animating single characters to animating words. Inertial bounce … ease in/out … random selection even! Gradients, auto-tracking … so many different “properties” available with a click or slide of a mouse.

When you buy typeGEMs vII, you install it as any other mogrt in your computer. I would recommend to a “local folder”. To use it, simply type “typegems” into the search field of the Essential Graphics (EGP) panel’s Browse tab, then drag/drop the “bGEMs – typeTEMs V2” item onto your timeline panel. Click on the graphic chip in the Timeline if it isn’t already selected. Then go to the EGP’s Edit tab and begin working.

Hit the “T” key to go into Text mode with the cursor, then either click/drag to set a “bounding box” for your text … or just click and start typing. After you have a few characters or words, start going through options to test out the various features and tools.

The various options may be confusing at first, so you might start by going to his page of on-site tutorials for typeGEMs.

Here’s a sampling he did of presets …

I was thrilled to do a tutorial for Roland on using the Gradient tab for this very fun and handy plugin.

So … here it is!

typeGEMs vII is one of several tools that Roland has created. He also has some excellent tutorials on a variety of techniques for AfterEffects and Premiere. I recommend going to his website broadcastgems.com to check out his other offerings.

typeGEMs V2 is available here.

A bit more about Roland … his “brief” bio:

Intensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations;
BorisFX/Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor & Adobe After Effects CC (Certified Expert & Certified Instructor); and Adobe Community Professional (ACP).

The post Revisiting: Easy animated text in Premiere Pro with typeGEMs V2 appeared first on rNeilphotog.