Adobe Releases Creative Cloud 2015

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Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe premiere pro cc, creative cloud, Creative Cloud applications, editing

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015

This week Adobe released the 2015 versions of its Creative Cloud suite of apps. There are lots of new Premiere Pro features, including many intriguing features centered around mobile interactivity. But the big ones that look like I could incorporate into my workflow immediately are:

• Lumetri Looks, for simpler, faster color grading
• Morph Cut, which seamlessly blends two clips to hide a jump cut
• Dynamic Link improvements, for better integration with After Effects and Audition

There are more cool features, like Character Animator, integration with Adobe Stock, Creative Cloud Libraries, and lots of other stuff. Check out the full list of changes here.

Creative Cloud 2015

Free AVCHD to Mov FTW

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe media encoder, adobe premiere pro cc, Apple, audio, AVCHD, creative cloud, geekery

Where’s Poochie?

I recently experienced a shock when I discovered one of the clips in my Premiere Pro project was missing ~90% of its audio. This was a clip I had shot myself, so I knew the audio had been recorded properly. But for some reason, a few minutes into the clip, it just disappeared. This is a camera, SDHC card, and transcoding workflow I have used 100’s of times; I have never had a problem like this.

Panicked googling led nowhere, largely because the search results were dominated by an old bug in Premiere CS6 that refused to import audio from any AVCHD footage ever. (I used to use Apple Compressor to import my AVCHD footage before moving it over to Premiere Pro for exactly this reason.)

I tried opening the card in MPEG Streamclip, but for all its Swiss Army-like beauty, MPEG Streamclip won’t read AVCHD files. Then on a whim I tried VLC, and sure enough, VLC could read it. And the audio was all there. But VLC is just a player, not a transcoder…

Still, I was much relieved knowing the audio was there; now it was just a matter of getting to it. I long ago ditched Final Cut Studio, so Compressor is no longer on my machine. And with MPEG Streamclip dead in the water, I had to begin looking for alternatives.

Free AVCHD to Mov

And that’s when I came across Free AVCHD to Mov on the App Store. I hate installing junk I don’t trust – especially ad-supported junk – but I needed a solution. So I gave it a shot, and it performed beautifully. With a simple interface that I probably could have figured out if I didn’t happen to be a professional editor, it grabbed the clip and transcoded it to ProRes 422LT with perfect audio.

I still don’t know what caused Adobe Media Encoder to choke on that file – all the other files from the same card shot on the same day were fine. (I have a theory about it being a bug triggered by the fact that the SD card was previously nearly 100% full, before being erased for this project – but I haven’t found anyone else to corroborate it.)

In any case, consider this my love letter to Free AVCHD to Mov. Thanks, bro!

Move Presets from Media Encoder CC 2013 to 2014

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe media encoder, adobe premiere pro cc, creative cloud, Creative Cloud applications, editing

If you’ve installed Adobe Media Encoder CC 2014 and want to get your custom presets from 2013, it’s actually pretty easy. Do this:

• Find your 2013 Presets directory. Mine was in /Users/jmatthewturner/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Common/AME/7.0/Presets
• In Media Encoder 2014, in the Preset Browser panel (top right by default), click the Import Preset button.
• Navigate to your 2013 Preset directory, highlight all your presets, and click Import.

That’s it! You can use them immediately without even restarting.

Premiere Pro Audio Synching Pitfall on Large Files

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe premiere pro cc, audio, creative cloud, editing

So impatient!

Just a quick tip: if you’re seeing the error message “Audio synchronization failure – Could not synchronize one or more clips in the current selection because a match could not be found” when trying to create a multicam clip synched via audio tracks on large files (inhale) – make sure you’ve waited long enough for the audio to conform.

This threw me off today after importing two hour-long clips that I needed to use for a multicam clip. When I checked each clip, Cam A was fine, but Cam B had no audio. Since I was using a rented camera for Cam B, I assumed something might have gone wrong with the on-board mic (Cam A had the real mics), before remembering to check if the audio had been conformed yet.

Since audio takes so long to conform in Premiere Pro, I had already googled the problem and read three different dead-ends before I opened the clip again and discovered the audio magically appeared.

Conforming Audio

An easy mistake to make, so I just thought I’d post this for anyone else impatiently googling that error and not finding the answer. Check the bottom right of your screen to see if it’s still conforming!

OS X Yosemite and Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

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adobe, Adobe Creative Cloud, adobe premiere pro cc, Apple, creative cloud, Creative Cloud applications, osx, yosemite

When Adobe released its 2014 Creative Cloud applications earlier this year, I put off upgrading due to the usual concerns of “I am not your guinea pig.” But with Apple’s release of Yosemite this week, I decided it was time.

OS X Yosemite

I installed Yosemite this morning, and promptly spent an hour on Apple Maps doing 3D flyovers of various cities. (I gather this feature has been available on Mavericks for a while, but since I never use Apple Maps, I only found it when it got added back to my dock.)

After that I had to download and install an update to TotalFinder (my older version was broken on Yosemite, and I simply cannot be without it for a moment). Although the update is listed as beta, it seems fine so far.

I’ll spare you the laundry list of changes (if laundry lists are your thing, check out Apple’s product page and Lifehacker’s Top Ten Hidden Features), but I do like the changes to Spotlight, and why on Earth it took them this long to make the Full Screen button actually make an app go full screen, I’ll never understand.

Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

Next I installed Premiere Pro 2014, and opened up a recent project to putz around. I immediately had to download new versions of and reinstall my plugins (and in one case buy an upgrade) to get everything to work properly. But once that was done, smooth sailing.

Of course the previous version of Premiere sits alongside 2014, so I was able to go back into my old project when I needed to gather some details to recreate one of those upgraded plugin effects.

All told, it has so far been relatively painless. I did have one crash the first time I opened Premiere, but I’ve closed and reopened it many times since then and it hasn’t repeated. (I suspect it was related to one of the outdated plugins sitting in the timeline.) Editing the project to recreate the various plugin effects exposed no problems, and an export through Media Encoder 2014 worked perfectly.

In sum, this Late 2013 iMac seems to be running both Yosemite and Premiere 2014 without a hitch. I’ll install the rest of CC 2014 in the coming days and update this post; I’ll do the same upgrades on my Mid 2009 MBP soon and post those results separately.

Adobe Premiere Pro / Audition Roundtrip Tutorial

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adobe, adobe premiere pro cc, audio, audition, creative cloud, editing

I created this tutorial for anyone who needs an overview of working with audio in Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition. It includes a basic roundtrip, splitting a stereo track into mono tracks, normalizing speech with the Speech Volume Leveler, and EQ’ing for voice.