CS5 updates: bug fixes, mobile CUDA +

An update to Premiere CS5 has a number of bug fixes (eg, for Colorista II) and adds support for more graphics card acceleration using CUDA on the GPU:

• Quadro 5000M (Windows only), which is for mobile (i.e., laptop) computers
• Quadro 4000 for Mac OS (The Windows version was enabled by the 5.0.2 update.)
• The full list of supported cards for CUDA is at Adobe

Todd Kopriva runs down Premiere CS5 5.0.3 at Premiere Pro work area.

Update: Todd notes detail pages for updates for several products in CS5 Production Premium updates: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Bridge, Camera Raw.

Update: On the AE-List Dec 30, Jarle Leirpoll noted that he gets realtime playback for several HD layers with several filters on his Dell Precision M6400 with the Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M. He said that it was worth some reboots (aka short stretching breaks).

After Effects Help updated, with transition

Todd Kopriva notes updated After Effects Help, and I’m now in Technical Support. Todd is no longer documentation lead for After Effects, which isn't really bad news because Todd will be providing help in a variety of public forums.

As a parting gift, Todd incorporated information and corrections from several hundred comments and updated the following Help documents (including the PDFs if that is your preferred format):

• After Effects CS5 Help
• Premiere Pro CS5 Help
• Adobe Media Encoder CS5 Help
• Premiere Pro CS4 Help
• Adobe Media Encoder CS4 Help

Let's hope the blog continues... read more on After Effects region of interest.

Will CS5 and MC5 toast FCP?

Oliver Peters has a thoughtful post on the state of editing software (with links to other recent reviews of Adobe and Avid releases) in Will CS5 and MC5 toast FCP? Here's a sample:

"It’s the ecosystem around FCP that changed it from an amateur DV editing software into a viable professional product. On the other hand, if you are working in news, then it’s more likely to be Avid than Final Cut. The main reason is the robustness of Avid’s news and shared storage solutions. Plus direct, professional support from the company, not a reseller.

In the case of Avid, Adobe and Apple, part of the business model is the suite of software that comes in the whole retail package. Avid Media Composer is typically considered as just the editing application, but in fact, the retail (boxed) version includes the Production Suite of 3rd party applications (Squeeze, BCC filters, Avid FX, Avid DVD and SmartSound). Although the emphasis is on Media Composer, this bundle offers you much of the same functionality as Apple Final Cut Studio or Adobe Production Premium CS5.

The other software is part of what people have built their businesses around. For example, design with Photoshop, build motion graphics with After Effects or Motion, color grade with Color and author with DVD Studio Pro, Encore or Avid DVD. All of these revenue streams factor into the decision of which way to go, aside from the simple choice of which editor to use. Swapping out the core platform is not a decision most owners take lightly in a challenged economy."

AE's CycoreFX inside Premiere Pro CS5

An updated test using Creative Cloud 2014, Using CycoreFX plug-ins in Premiere Pro and After Effects, can be found on Pro Video Coalition.

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Pierre Louis Beranek tested the 8-bit CycoreFX plug-ins built into After Effects in Premiere Pro CS5 to find out which ones work. He moved the Cycore folder to Adobe > Common ... > MediaCore (both AE and Premiere check the Common folder).

The results of his tests, which were scraped up from the ether, are subject to further testing on a user's part -- the results are provisional and unsupported by Adobe. Cycore's only supported host app for any product is After Effects, but the list may help you decide which filters would work in Premiere apart from Dynamic Link [see comments]. Testing here found that some effects work but not in every case. For example, CC Clylinder works fine in Premiere, even the Z space parameter, but it doesn't work when exported from AE & imported into Premiere in "desktop mode."

Pierre Louis adds his own usage notes at the bottom:

1. Ball Action N
2. Bend It Y (useful?) (ES)
3. Bender Y (useful?) (ES)
4. Blobbylize N
5. Bubbles N
6. Burn Film N
7. Color Offset N
8. Composite Y (useful?)
9. Cylinder Y (useful?) (ES)
10. Drizzle N
11. Flo Motion N
12. Force Motion Blur N
13. Glass N
14. Glass Wipe N
15. Glue Gun N
16. Grid Wipe Y (ES)
17. Griddler N
18. Hair N
19. Image Wipe Y (ES)
20. Jaws Y
21. Kaleida N
22. Lens N
23. Light Burst 2.5 N
24. Light Rays N
25. Light Sweep Y (very useful!) (ES)
26. Light Wipe Y
27. Mr. Mercury N
28. Page Turn Y (ES)
29. Particle Systems II Y (fully functional?) (ES)
30. Particle World N (crashes PP)
31. Pixel Polly Y (not fully functional)
32. Power Pin N
33. PS Classic (obsolete) Y (fully functional?)
34. PS LE Classic (obsolete) Y (fully functional?)
35. Radial Blur N
36. Radial Fast Blur Y (ES)
37. Radial ScaleWipe Y (ES)
38. Rain Y (ES)
39. RepeTile Y (ES)
40. Ripple Pulse N
41. Scale Wipe N
42. Scatterize Y (ES)
43. Simple Wire Removal Y (useful?)
44. Slant Y (ES)
45. Smear N
46. Snow Y (ES)
47. Sphere N
48. Split Y (useful?)
49. Spotlight Y (ES)
50. Star Burst N
51. Threshold RGB Y
52. Threshold Y
53. Tiler N
54. Toner Y (better version of PP’s Tint effect) (ES)
55. Twister Y (ES)
56. Vector Blur N
57. Wide Time Y

Notes: some of these effects work great in Premiere, especially ’Light Sweep’. TimeBlend, TimeBlendFX and Split2 don’t appear at all in Premiere and therefore don’t work. All of these effects were tested on a single 720P Sony XDCAM clip, therefore it’s possible that some effects that are marked as ’N’ (not working) could perhaps work on other media. ’Y’ doesn’t mean that all of the effect’s properties work properly, since I didn’t test each individual parameter for each effect.


Update: these filters were tested further and discussed in a New Premiere training from Eran Stern, released in Feb 2011 (added as ES above).

Creating Video Portfolios with Flash Catalyst

In Creating Video Portfolios with Flash Catalyst at Adobe TV, Karl Soule demonstrates Flash Catalyst, a new tool in CS5 Production Premium to create interactive designs without coding. There's more at the Adobe TV Flash Catalyst channel; in the sample below Terry White runs through his 5 favorite features.

CS5 Production Premium Road Show

You can sign up to attend the CS5 Production Premium Road Show that's hitting 7 North American cities in May and early June:

• May 18 - New York, NY
• May 20 - Orlando, FL
• May 25 - Dallas, TX
• May 27 - Atlanta, GA
• June 3 - Vancouver, B.C.
• June 8 - San Francisco, CA
• June 10 - Los Angeles, CA

Layers videos on CS5 roto, mocha, and Color Finesse

Layers Magazine has a CS5 Learning Center with a few intro tutorials for each main app in the Creative Suites, including After Effects tutorial videos by Rod Harlan on Interface Enhancements, Mocha AE Version 2, Roto Brush, and Color Finesse.

Learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

Stephen Muratore, Todd Kopriva's counterpart for Premiere, has been hard at work with many updates recently to his blog Adobe Premiere Pro Training. Premiere Pro Help is live; here's the table of contents and some descriptions of new features.

New today is Learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, an text outline of support resources. Learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 on Adobe TV is a collection mostly from Lynda.com that covers basics along with the CS5 Production Premium Feature Tour. Here's a sample:

Lynda.com CS5 Essential Training available

With the release of CS5, Lynda.com has posted their Essential Training series for CS5. This includes basics on After Effects CS5, Encore, and Premiere Pro by Chad Perkins, and the rest of Production Premium by a variety of authors.

CS5 Launch Event videos on Adobe TV

The CS5 Launch Event videos are now available on Adobe TV. Here's CS5 for video production:

What's new in Premiere Pro CS5 & Production Premium

Check out also What's new in Premiere Pro CS5 and CS5 Production Premium, which adds Flash Catalyst and updates for the other apps! PC Magazine has a review of CS5.

You can also sign up to attend the CS5 Production Premium Road Show that's hitting 7 North American cities in May and early June so far.

Here's an intro to CS5 Production Premium by Karl Soule from Adobe TV's CS5 Production Premium Feature Tour:



Update: At PVC, Scott Simmons kicks the tires on Adobe Premiere Pro CS5: Better, Faster, Bigger and Especially Faster.

Update 2: Adobe's Stephen Muratore has new posts linking Premiere Help, intro videos, and related matters on his blog Adobe Premiere Pro Training.

Final Cut Studio 3 slower than FCS 2, CS5 faster than CS4

Rob Morgan’s Bare Feats Final Cut Studio shootout and secondchairvideo (via Douglas Parker) say that Final Cut Studio 3 Disappoints in Further Testing (with Leopard and Snow Leopard), while Adobe claims faster rendering AE & Premiere CS5 according to Michael Coleman in the Motionworks interview and @KarlSoule in Debunking Mercury Myths.

We'll have to wait at least until after April 12 to see if some brave soul will test both the Apple and Adobe suites. Of course, stability and features are another matter.

Transcriptize: CS4 transcriptions to Media Composer, Excel, and Final Cut

Assisted Editing has a new product it seems to make Adobe speech transcriptions more useful for users of other software. Transcriptize takes transcriptions from Adobe CS4 Production Premium to Media Composer, Excel and Final Cut Pro.

Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over

Adobe's Jason Levine talks about Noise Reduction Workflow For Vocal & Voice-Over in part of an episode of Short and Suite, the Adobe.tv series that shows users how to use Production Premium with real post-production examples. Unfortunately this and other demos were done Adobe Audition 3, one of Adobe's elite apps, superior to the similar but hobbled app now included in the Adobe video suite.

Noise/Hum Removal in Adobe Audition 3 from Jason Levine on Vimeo.

Update: Ignore the whining and check out Jason's useful posts on issues like normalization and volume matching, etc.

Metadata, search, analytics & monetization

A recent Beet.TV interview with Delve Networks bumps them up in awareness, but it's an older interview that really lets Delve explain how they see the semantic web, metadata, and video will work:



That interview is good background to understand the early March Adobe & Time-Warner announcement of "a strategic alliance to foster collaboration on the development of next generation video and rich media experiences." In the Beet.TV interview below, Adobe's Jennifer Taylor explains the alliance, mentioning planned collaboration on implementing Adobe's video ecosystem ('from planning to playback') and on digital rights management, metadata & search, and audience measurement & monetization. And on his blog John Dowdell fleshed out some aspects of the announcement that seemed a bit vague. It seems that DRM is wanted before HBO rolls out The Sopranos, The Wire, and Entourage, etc.



There's not much for regular users from Google or Adobe on this front quite yet, though you can find a Delve example of speech metadata exposed in Speech-to-Text metadata in web video. If you want to understand Adobe's video metadata pipeline, Dan Ebberts' recently posted an article at Adobe that nicely steps you through current metadata and speech features, XMP metadata in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium (see that article's comments for alternative method for After Effects).

There's more background on metadata in previous posts here.

Update: Contentinople notes that Gotuit Enables Video Mashups With Metadata:

"Video metadata management firm Gotuit is signing up media customers by enabling them to chop up, mix and match, and create interactive video mashups...

QuickKicks allows users to view video feeds from each game -- broken down into categories such as game highlights, goals, and saves -- and will include specific player highlights from each team. The site also includes the ability for users to create their custom playlists and share those playlists with friends.

While the ability to create video mashups isn't particularly new, Gotuit has taken a novel approach to the feature, by enabling content companies to use metadata to define where video clips start and stop.

In other words, rather than editing the full-length video of a soccer match into multiple smaller video files, Gotuit works by allowing content owners to create "clips" by marking start and end points within the larger video file. The publisher can then identify what's happening in those clips with certain pre-defined metadata tags, for easy search and discoverability"

64 bit computing and Premiere Pro CS4 4.0.1

The Genesis Project notes An article on 64 bit computing and Production Premium by Jan Ozer. In this 1st part of a series on the topic, Ozer says:

"I had two eight-core systems: the Windows workstation, a 2.83GHz HP xw6600 running Windows XP (32-bit version) with 3GB of RAM, and a 3.2GHz Mac running OS X version 10.5.5 with 8GB of RAM. Rendering out to Blu-ray compatible MPEG-2 took 68 minutes on the Windows workstation, 11 minutes on the Mac. ...

Faster performance and responsiveness, with full support for 64-bit computing platforms to accelerate compute-intensive postproduction tasks. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 is architected to take advantage of the additional memory available in 64-bit systems."

Ozer also gives some background and includes a Q&A with Giles Baker, Adobe's Group Product Manager for Editing Workflows.

CS4 AVCHD Editing + big AE feature list

Dave Helmly at Adobe has comments and a movie at an Intro to CS4 and New AVCHD Editing.

Todd Kopriva details an unordered, approximately comprehensive list of new features in After Effects CS4.

P2 Premiere demo at Adobe DVA lab

The Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast has a demo of the P2 Premiere update and a visit to the DVA lab at Adobe San Jose with John Loiacono, Giles Baker, and Wil Renczes. See it in Behind the scenes with Johnny L. and the Production Premium team. There's also a look at CS3 in The Making of the Johnny L. podcast.

You'll need a secret decoder ring to decipher the vague hints at future developments in CS4. Moving right along, you can find links to P2 features of Apple, Adobe, and Avid products in these posts.
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