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Part 12: Premiere Pro Desert Island Challenge
If one of the goals of this ‘Premiere Pro Desert Island Challenge’ series is to figure out what one add-on I’d purchase to enhance our color correction workflow within Premiere Pro then the 2015.3 update has given us a serious contender… with their new support for Tangent control surfaces.
Color correcting quickly and efficiently in a non-linear editor is really hard.
Non-linear editing interfaces just aren’t designed for the many nuanced tasks that an experienced, talented colorist wants to perform on their images. And working with a mouse? I like to say, that’s like color correcting with the tip of a single fingernail. Color correcting with a control surface? Suddenly you can use all ten fingers on both your hands—to perform multiple actions at once.
A control surface allows a colorist to try and discard multiple ideas, very very quickly—something that can’t be replicated when using a ‘single action at a time’ mouse.
With the 2015.3 update, the Tangent Element and Premiere Pro CC are now integrated.
In fact, the entire line of modern Tangent control surfaces are now supported with the Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 update. This includes the Element, the Wave and the newest Tangent hardware, the Ripple. In this Insight, I’ll show you how well this new integration works. Frankly, I’m impressed.
And since the Adobe team utilized the Tangent Hub software APIs, as an end user you’ll be able to customize the default settings with your own flourishes and favorite features.
Keep in mind: This new integration isn’t just keyboard shortcuts but truly integrated UI controls and impressive responsiveness
Yes, you can adjust multiple trackballs and contrast rings, simultaneously. You can jump between the various Lumetri effect sub-panels with the push of a button, and spin multiple knobs simultaneously without the software lagging.
And the Jog control is A-List, top-notch… as good as it gets
Seriously, for editors or colorists needing to do detailed work who want to spin a jog wheel to rock across edit points or dial in to a precise on-screen moment? You will jump for joy with the precision of the Jog and Shuttle wheel. It’s clear that Adobe copied this functionality directly from SpeedGrade CC, since that bit of kit has had precisely this kind of precision since Day 1 of their Tangent integration. And speaking of SpeedGrade CC…
SpeedGrade CC, is it End of Life?
Frankly, it’s time for Adobe to admit to itself – and its users – that SpeedGrade CC is no longer being developed. Yes, you can download it from their website – but the Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 Update has pulled integration between Premiere and SpeedGrade. It’s unfortunate since I loved SpeedGrade’s 12-way color corrector paradigm. I honestly feel there are Looks I can achieve in that app that I’ve never been able to replicate elsewhere. But it has quite a few shortcomings that kept me from adopting it as my full-time platform—and Adobe stopped doing any kind of significant improvements a few years ago. So I stopped using it (and teaching it).
It would be nice if Adobe officially announced its plans for SpeedGrade. But then, the Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 update pretty much did that for us, didn’t it? With this update, SpeedGrade will no longer open Premiere Pro CC project files beyond the 2015.2 update.
Coming Next in this series: Customizing the Tangent Element and Premiere Pro using the Hub software
I’ve found the default settings for the Tangent Element to be too fine-tuned. It seems to take way too much work to saturate up a log-recorded image. I found that a simple black-balance using the shadows trackball takes too many pushes of the trackball to get even small results. In the next Insight in this series you’ll learn how simple it is to modify these default behaviors. Plus, we’ll look at how to further customize the Element’s display and button actions.
Enjoy this video!
-pi
