I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek of Premiere and SpeedGrade, as well as After Effects CS6 – all included in the upcoming release of Adobe Production Premium CS6. I must say that the FCP + Color paradigm has not only been successfully matched by Premiere + SpeedGrade, it has been improved upon exponentially. With Adobe Production Premium CS6 you now have a fully native .R3D capable post pipeline for 2D & stereoscopic 3D projects.
I’ve worked with Premiere 5.5 on a couple of projects now and some big plusses were native .dpx file playback and good workflow interoperability with After Effects. The real time DPX playback can be particularly nice for VFX editorial pipelines. Not sure how important this is for Adobe though I’m sure folks at The Foundry working on Hiero are paying close attention to these developments. Of course one of Premiere’s ongoing strengths has been EDL and XML pass through so if Hiero is already a big part of your pipeline Premiere will have no problem playing nice.
Obviously, the dynamic link functionality with After Effects is great for cutting animatics, managing and versioning the work of several motion graphics artists in your timeline while continuing to peice together a story and edit audio in a functional NLE GUI. The keyboard shortcut capabilities of Premiere 5.5 definitely left something, well ok quite a few things, to be desired. From what I’ve seen so far in Premiere CS 6 this has been a point of emphasis for marked improvement by the Adobe team and it shows. Josh Weiss of Retooled.net has quite a few nice tutorials so click thru and check them out. And I’m not an After Effects person but Chris Meyer certainly is; you can read all about his take on After Effects CS6 and its new features here.
As for SpeedGrade, I’ve been using it in a playback and review environment for about a year and a half now (the last version released by IRIDAS before the Adobe purchase). It is definitely a step up from Color as a conform tool, it has stereo 3D optimization features and a legacy of color grading chops, and it also has lots of potential as a front end on set data management system since it can be equipped with a Red Rocket card. What I like most about SpeedGrade is that it rounds out Production Premium CS6 to be a fully functional 4K post production pipeline. It fits the Final Cut Studio paradigm so many of us have come to know, love and expect. And it’s brought to you by a company that has a proven track record of treating its suite of applications like its life blood.
Looking forward to implementing this new suite into full time post production pipelines… see you at NAB!
proactively • refreshed • peter
pro • active • ly 
Very excited about this upgrade. Especially curious to see how Speedgrade fits into a Premiere-AE roundtripping pipeline as well as how it compares with a node based product like Resolve.
Yes James I am excited as well. SpeedGrade is not a node based program like Resolve, much more similar to Adobe’s layer-based applications. For me the most exciting aspect of the SpeedGrade addition is the ability for a self-contained stereoscopic 3D pipeline completely within Production Premium CS6. The only missing element is DCP creation – of course there are plenty of plug-ins and apps that can do that for you readily available.
I hope you’re right about a “3D pipeline”. So far the only mention of 3D in the relaesed CS6 PDF files is in AE.Have you seen anything to indicate a real stereoscopic editing capability in Premiere CS6?
I have not seen anything feature specific so far, like what Avid is doing with Media Composer. However you can certainly implement the same stereoscopic 3D workflows many folks have been using in FCP. This typically involves requesting a side-by-side and dominant eye quicktime file for all footage. Then, with a bit of the ‘ole tickle and wiggle, you can view either 2D or half resolution 3D of your timeline on the appropriate monitoring system.
The addition of SpeedGrade and it’s ability to conform from EDL provides a closed-loop solution for stereo 3D offline, stereo 3D optimization and DI.
I’m starting with M2TS files from Sony TD10 so I don’t have separate side by side MOV files. Importing MTS into Premiere apparently de-muxes into one channel. Side by side MOV would make titles impractical. I’ve been experimenting with trial versions of Vegas along with some “toys” from Cyberlink and Arcsoft, I don’t have FCP and the $3000 Neo is waaaaaay out of my range at this point. I can only monitor in Anaglyph. Without Adobe it’s a bit of a dead end.
I will certainly ask the Adobe team about this while I’m at NAB, what is the Neo application that your referring to?
Cineform shows Studio for $3,000 but B&H shows NEO 3D for $1,000 and plain “Cineform” for $279. It’s a bit confusing, especially when Adobe is suddenly silent with regard to 3D and CS6. If I were to invest in any of the above and it doesn’t work with CS6…. then what?
Got it Tim that absolutely makes sense. I will be sure to make this a point of research for my NAB trip, you will definitely be seing more from me regarding Premiere and steresocopic pipelines moving forward.
I really appreciate your response and I’ll hope for the best…
I got word from GoPro that Neo3D is now called GoPro Studio Professional, which CineForm says can be considered to be the Neo3D for CS6, but they may need to release an update to make sure that it installs the sequence presets and other plugins. They expect to be releasnig their own sequence presets soon, Those with Neo3D can upgrade to the new version for $49.
Or maybe I should just forget Adobe and go to GrassValley Edius….