NAB 2015: Colourful changes from Adobe

Lumetri adds new colour capabilities to Premiere Pro

Highlights from the latest round of Adobe releases include completely new colour workflows for video editors, a rather ingenious new mobile app that captures Looks for video and a whole lot more.

First out of the box, there are a range of new capabilities being added to the company’s top range Premiere Pro editing package, not least of which is the introduction of the new Lumetri Color Panel, which combines the 32-bit floating-point colour science of the company’s SpeedGrade CC colour corrector with Adobe Lightroom functionality and ease-of-use. Adobe reckons this provides a colour toolset and workflow unavailable in any other editing application, and makes colour an organic part of the editing process.

Certainly it’s almost a perfect mirror image of what Blackmagic has been up to with Resolve 12. There, more powerful editing has been added to the colour grader to provide a complete finishing package, while with Adobe it’s the other way round. Other new Premiere Pro features include Morph Cut for automatically smoothing transitions in talking head sequences, the addition of a mobile to desktop workflow via Premiere Clip, more natively supported formats, and some impressively customisable and toggleable task-oriented workspaces

One of the more important new features across the Adobe range is the addition of Creative Cloud Libraries, which allow user to share assets between Adobe applications, projects, and team members. “Capture a Look in Project Candy or develop a graphic in Photoshop and then access those files directly within Premiere Pro,” says the marketing bumph excitedly.

Project Candy? It’s an awful name but glad you asked.

Essentially it’s a new mobile technology in development, that provides an easy way to capture light and colour dynamics and save them as Looks. Simply use a cameraphone to capture interesting lighting or colour schemes from the world around you, refine it in an interesting new interface that presents hue and brightness as colour bubbles in 3D space, then save the Look in your Personal Look library and access it from the likes of Premiere Pro. And there you have it: exactly the tones of the sunset you just witnessed all ready to deploy on your latest film.

Elsewhere, After Effects has new previews and a fine control Face Tracker, there’s a completely new 2D package called Adobe Character Animator, Speedgrade CC has optimised scope performance and new Looks, Media Encoder gets a new feature called Time Tuner that lets you change the duration of a project by removing frames instead of micro-editing, and there’s a whole lot more as befits a company that now has its fingers in an awful lot of creative pies.

Normally about now we’d be directing you to a press release over the page, but rather unsurprisingly much of the detailed information from Adobe seems to be in PDF form and thus a bit resistant to web formatting. So, here’s a link to it all instead: Creative Cloud for Video: What’s New 2015.