The Editblog

Adobe Premiere Express is not to be confused with Adobe Premiere Elements. AP Express is web application for video editing and it’s being used on the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe campaign. Head over the the Editblog on PVC for the scoop and a link to where you can use it to edit your own Hyundai Genesis Coupe spot!

Adobe’s CS4 Production Premium suite of applications was packed full of big new features. There’s mocha for After Effects, native RED .R3D editing in Premiere Pro and After Effects, XML import of Final Cut Pro projects, a unified interface among the applications, better dynamic linking and a lot more. And there is also the ability to automatically transcribe video and audio clips. For editors doing documentary work or a lot of talking heads then this could be a killer feature. Automated transcription almost seems to good to be true … and you know what they say about something that is too good to be true…

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I couldn’t let the day get by without giving the new native RED .R3D import and editing function a quick test. My first thought after playing around with this functionality is that this is by far the best implementation of native .R3D editing and it blows the Final Cut Pro support out of the water. I won’t go into a lot of detail on setting it all up as all the info is available other places and in a document that comes with the RED Adobe CS4 installer. There’s also some initial reactions from Noah at Twenty398 as well as the best way to learn about this new workflow: a 30 minute video on AdobeTV.

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I was recently having an email conversation with Shane Ross of Little Frog in Hi Def about Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. It was discussed on episode 2 of That Post Show by myself, John Flowers and Paul Zadie. Most of us really liked what we’ve seen of Premiere Pro CS4 thus far, but that was admittedly the shiny new features and just (at least for me) limited playtime in the application. Shane asked the hard questions that many other editors I’m sure are asking. Does the app have “all the basics that I as a storyteller crave?” I knew some of the answers, but not all of them so I dug around a bit deeper with Premiere Pro CS4 to try and find out.

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I couldn’t let the day go by without trying the XML importing capability that was added in the Adobe Premiere Pro 4.0.1 update to take and edit from FCP, export an XML and then import that edit into Premiere Pro CS4. The skinny? Not too shabby for a first try, both for Adobe’s implementation and my attempt.

From Final Cut I took a simple edit with 3 layers of video and audio. The original FCP timeline looked like this:

And the Premiere Pro CS4 XML import of this sequence:

That’s not bad. Dissolves are right, disabled clip is disabled, everything looks like it’s there. Premiere doesn’t have an indicator for a through-edit like FCP does. Of special note is that this is a 23.98 HD ProRes edit. Premiere Pro was able to relink to the ProRes QuickTime files as well as render in the ProRes codec for playback in the Premiere Pro timeline. Makes since as ProRes is an installed codec on the system. I have no idea if this is officially support btw.

You even get a nice little text file that imports into Premiere Pro to let you know what may have gone wrong in the import:

The above sequence had a number of color corrections from Magic Bullet Looks that didn’t translate and they were noted in the report. I’d call that a successful first test from FCP to Premiere Pro. But then when I went to send that edit to After Effects it crashed. We’ll have to troubleshoot that one later. A simple, single layer SD edit was able to successfully go from FCP to PPro to AE. I think this is something a lot of people might be looking for as a workaround if you don’t have Automatic Duck. Theoretically it’s possible but something wouldn’t let me HD sequence work. Maybe it didn’t like the ProRes files.

Over at the Pro Video Coalition, Mike Curtis has posted a piece talking about … wait for it … the future (including Final Cut Pro) of the big 3 A’s (Apple, Avid, Adobe) and their RED support. This is the most detailed information we have heard about what’s in store for Final Cut Pro and its RED support. I would go so far to say that hell may have frozen over without our knowledge as Mike seems to be talking about a future version of the product.

According to Mike, the demo showed a new functionality to the Log and Transfer tool that rewraps RED’s .R3D files while copying the media to your Capture Scratch folder. Currently you re-encode the media through Log and Transfer to ProRes (one of several other options for getting media into FCP). Re-encoding takes time and affects quality as the footage takes a hit. Mike also makes a good comparison to shooting RAW still images with a DSLR and then working from a JPEG and not the RAW. The same thing happens when you encode to ProRes and never touch the .R3Ds again. I’ve speculated before that a large majority of RED projects transcode to ProRes and never touch the .R3Ds again so this new Log and Transfer functionality will be a good thing. But let’s be honest, anything that FCP adds to better support new and emerging media formats is a good thing. Mike also talks about upcoming support in both Color and Final Cut Server. Thanks to Mike for posting this information since we so very rarely ever get a glimpse of an upcoming version of Final Cut Pro.

He also mentions Adobe’s support and Avid. We’ve seen the Adobe implementation that works directly with the .R3D files and it looks promising. And Avid has publicly voiced and demonstrated support for RED so we can expect regular advances in their support as well. So from what we’ve seen publicly Apple’s support for Final Cut Pro looks to be catch-up at this point. Apple so rarely talks about future products it’s hard to know. Avid has great native support for MXF. Adobe is working on native support for .R3Ds. Final Cut Pro has native support only for QuickTime. Something is better than nothing but as these new formats continue to advance FCP is again falling behind.

A delivery of Adobe CS4 Production Premium arrived last night. The install when rather quickly with an uninstall of CS3 and the install of CS4 in under 2 hours. Be sure and restart after the install (I wasn’t prompted to do so) as several of the applications wouldn’t launch until I restarted. The interface enhancements are pretty cool and go a long way toward making CS4 feel like one very integrated piece of software. I just wish I had more time to explore but other work calls. The funniest thing I saw was the line in the Encore splash screen:

Take that you old and out of date DVD Studio Pro!