Joining Forces with Cinema Grade

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Some time has passed since I told you that I’m back in the game. And in the meantime this happened: Cinema Grade for Windows. As you can see, I am again directly involved in reducing your pains in using color grading tools during editing. Take a look at that Kickstarter page and then come back, I’ll tell you a story of how it came to pass.

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The Master of Color Manipulation

3D LUT Creator

I learnt image color correction in several stages. First was of course playing in RGB with scanned pictures. I used shareware Paint Shop Pro back in those days, which at some point was acquired by Corel. And it was cool, levels – or actually auto-levels – was all the buzz, as well as Hue and Saturation. Curves felt almost like magic. Then I took a desktop publishing course, read a few books, and learnt about CMYK and prepress. That was the first time I heard about color models, working with channels, as well as various issues that arose from incorrect conversions between various CMYK and RGB profiles.

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Two Great Strides in the Democratisation of Colour Grading

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Regular readers of this blog know, that I have been dreaming about a low-cost grading control surface for years. At some point I even considered attempting to build one myself, but this project never got more serious than an extensive set of notes. There were a few remotely interesting ideas around, including the Oxygen TecPro panel, the use of Kingston trackball or some midi hacks with various controllers, but these were either makeshift or still too expensive, not suited for the ultimate goal that was to make every editor have it in their suite. Today the announcement of Tangent Ripple and support for it in the upcoming update of Adobe Premiere Pro and Color Finale for FCPX hopefully closes this chapter.
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Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects Plug-in Development Course on fxphd.com

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I’m happy to announce, that this term I’m teaching plug-in development for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects on fxphd. I’ll be covering the basics of C/C++ and Adobe After Effects SDK in a bit more detail, as well as GPU acceleration for Premiere. All these will be illustrated with a simple vignette effect that we are going to create during the course with the students. Believe it or not, any similarities to the very first effect that I wrote are coincidental. see more

The Inevitable Convergence III – The NLE/Grading Edition

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With the introduction of Resolve 12, suddenly the race towards a unified NLE/Grading tool become very interesting. It’s hard to argue, that colour correction and grading became an integral part of post-production workflow. It’s also seemingly one of the low-hanging fruits, as opposed to visual effects and audio. Let’s see what is going on for all major players in this regard.

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Simplicity Overdone

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I was hoping to bring you something more than my ramblings about the user interface overhaul in the latest Adobe release, but unfortunately it looks like the interview with the User Experience (UX) team will not be forthcoming, despite initial positive reactions. My impatience has caught up with me, and therefore I present you with the reasons for my vocal criticism of the new UI. see more

Premiere Pro Clip Markers – Solved!

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I’ve written a lot about Premiere Pro and metadata. Surprisingly, almost as an after thought, the solution was shipped in the October 2014 release of Creative Cloud applications. It is hiding in the preference panel under the “Media” tab, and is called “Write clip markers to XMP”. I believe this is one of the most important features that was added to Premiere, because it addresses the issue of backup, archive and project sharing and also helps with on-line/off-line workflows.

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Nuke Studio For After Effects

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When I first saw the demonstration of Nuke Studio shown on NAB, with each new feature I was thinking: yes, this is exactly as it should be done. This is precisely how Dynamic Link should work from the get go in Adobe applications. Congratulations to The Foundry for making it happen. I wish I could afford your tool :) see more

How To Fix Hiero XML Export For Premiere… Sort Of

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Some time ago, if you ever tried to export XML from Hiero to Premiere, you got a generic importer error message and that was it. This issue – audio related – was thankfully fixed in later versions of Hiero. However, another hydra reared its ugly head, and this time attempted XML interchange resulted in something along these lines: see more