The Circle Is Now Complete

I’m certain you will be able to read about the new features introduced in Premiere Pro 7.1 on dozens of websites. I won’t bother repeating them all. Let me – as usual – focus on the issues that I consider the most relevant and usually not covered.

Direct Link is an exception but it’s so awesome that it earned itself a separate enthusiastic note on my blog.

JKL navigation has finally gone over its maximum of x4. Brilliant. Sequences can now be scrubbed in the thumbnail mode – very useful, promotes using nested sequences for various clip manipulations, and making the idea of nesting each clip as its own sequence quite viable. This is how Smoke works, and sometimes it can be useful, especially for VFX shots.

Editable sequence settings – long awaited for – finally allow you to duplicate your sequence with all track audio filters. I missed it since CS3, where you could change the settings by simply importing the project into the one with different resolution and/or rendering codec. A non-obvious application of this feature is that if you are using the same audio track configurations, you can finally have a single template sequence which you can then duplicate and adjust to your preference.

A small preference allowing the current trim tool to change the trim type brings back the standard CS5 and earlier functionality of using modifier keys and the selection tool to manipulate the timeline. If you enable it, then no longer is the trim type locked after being selected. Depending on your style of work it’s desirable or not. But if you’re a long-standing Premiere user, you are going to appreciate it.

Something you won’t find mentioned anywhere else is the fact that the RGB curves plugin is finally working as it should, even better than it did in CS6. The slope of interpolation over 1 is finally equal to the slope of the curve, not being 45 degrees all the time. Big thanks to Steve Hoeg for this one, and apologies for losing my temper over the issue more than once to the whole Premiere team, and especially Steve.

In conclusion, it’s great to see Premiere back to its former self again. All the new features it gained in-between are just an icing on the cake, elevating it to a new level. Thanks for respecting long-time users, Adobe! Now if we could only do something about the selection primacy…

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