The new release of Adobe Video apps has dropped in time for Christmas. I’ve been too busy working on my interactive video platform Stornaway.io (check it out!) to update here for the last couple of years, but I thought I’d start updating here again because I saw the new features are things I’ve wanted while working on videos in the last month. Even though they’re not huge features, they make me happy.

Let me draw heavily on a post by Eric Philpott at Adobe on LinkedIn with some of my own comments.

The December release of the Creative Cloud video applications adds really useful and long awaited text and shape tools in Premiere Pro and innovations that fast-track puppet design and animation in Adobe Character Animator – also long awaited (for me, anyway). Plus performance improvements for Apple silicon & Windows machines with integrated GPUs.

First, the text & shapes in Premiere

Search and replace text across all graphics & titles & transcripts – spell check – shapes with rounded corners (hallelujah – crazy how long these have taken to come to Premiere!)

Open the new Text panel to see a running list of all the graphics in your sequence. Use search to find graphics with specific words, use search and replace to update multiple graphics at once, and spell check to catch typos.

A new universal text engine makes it easy to work with different languages and scripts, even within the same graphic. Middle Eastern and South Asian creators using right-to-left scripts now have all the controls they need in the Essential Graphics panel.

This is all stuff that started to be hinted at almost 10 years ago with Story, but never emerged. Glad it’s all here now.

The shape tools have been improved, too, with a new polygon tool and controls for rounded corners. Rounded corners!

Next, Puppet Maker and Transcript Sync in Character Animator

New Puppet Maker is delivering more of the promise that Adobe Animal hinted at years ago – but remained too hard for most people to use. It now lets you create, customize, and animate your own characters in Adobe Character Animator. Previously, you had to first build and rig a layered puppet in Photoshop or Illustrator, or use one of the pre-built puppets in Character Animator. Puppet Maker gives you the immediacy of starting in Character Animator and the freedom to design your own character from a variety of styles, without leaving the application.

Once built, creators can use their web cam or a connected camera to animate their character using their own voice, facial expressions, and body movements. Performance capture provides a highly interactive and efficient workflow for recording and refining animations and Puppet Maker makes this innovative toolset accessible to any content creators who want to incorporate animations in their content, such as social media posts, or characters in explainer videos.

Creating animations with text transcripts 🎉

New Transcript-based Lip Sync allows creators to animate their character’s mouth movements using written scripts or transcriptions, including transcripts generated with Speech to Text in Premiere Pro. Available for English only at the moment – you may have seen that the Adobe Sensei powered Speech to Text has very good accuracy.

Performance improvements for Mac and PC

Adobe says, “Premiere Pro allows users to take advantage of the latest technologies. New hardware acceleration for Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max systems delivers up to 5x faster performance for 4k and 8K ProRes formats. High resolution HEVC formats are also faster on all Apple silicon Macs running macOS 12. Display technology optimizations on Windows systems with integrated GPUs will see playback performance improvements ranging from 5 percent to 40 percent across all formats. Color Match is now 30 percent faster, accelerating shot matching workflows, and two more effects are now GPU-accelerated.”

And not to forget AE

The latest release of After Effects includes the new universal text engine, described above, and the latest version of Cinema 4D Lite with support for the full version of the Maxon Cinema 4D R25.

Finally, Happy Christmas!!

I just made this interactive 360 video Christmas card for all our Stornaway users, using the immersive 360 tools in Premiere, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Hopefully I’ll find time to post the workflow and tips in the New Year. Hope you have a restful break.

I hardly ever update here now – my posts have all been on LinkedIn and Stornaway.io for a long time (Please follow my new company blog there). But I saw a post today on the LinkedIn Premiere group that I thought I should share. And maybe post here a bit more often. I get so many emails (and work projects) from the Canon XF post that clearly this site is well ranked on Google, and posts here can help more people.

Anyway, the post in question is from Chris Strider in the Premiere group, whose Premiere crashed repeatedly mid-export on a tight deadline (of course) with the helpfully informative error:

“Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Pro CC to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project.

A horror familiar to anybody who’s ever used any NLE (Non Locatable Errors).

The culprit was a Morph Cut transition, which is something that’s failed for me too. And Chris Hanselaar said in the comments that it happened to him so much he’s stopped using Morph Cut altogether.

Here’s the post – hopefully it’ll remain searchable & findable here for someone tearing their hair out on a deadline. If so, let me know. Meanwhile, join the Adobe Premiere group on LinkedIn.

I came across this issue with Premiere crashing in the middle of an export on a tight deadline with only the crash & error message of:

“Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere Pro CC to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project.”

Answer: After hours of troubleshooting, finally found the culprit to be a Morph Cut between two clips in my sequence. Once removing that Morph Cut, the export was quick and successful.

Wanted to share this info to help those who have before or may run into this issue in the future. The culprit could be a Morph Cut or some other sort of transition. Hope this helps!

#premiere #adobe #troubleshooting #creativity #videoeditor #video

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6494302916948611072

This is a post explaining the Canon XF folder structure that’s used by Canon professional video cameras, principally the XF305 and C300 (there may be others).

Some of this relates to Premiere, and how it is vital to import Canon XF clips properly using Media Browser (never using File > Import or drag and drop).

But mostly it is about the way the Canon folder structure and file naming works, which is something I learnt a lot about years ago onsite at the BBC, and have been meaning to share ever since.  I’m planning to post about the Sony and Panasonic and Red structures, too.

To be honest, I was always hoping someone else would do it – but nobody ever has.  So either nobody else understands it, or the few of us who do have just been hoping someone else would shoot first.

So, here’s the thing:

Professional cameras record their data onto cards in complex folder structures and files.

From our phones and pocket cameras, we’re used to video clips being recorded as single .MOV or .MP4 files which you can copy off and view and edit just by themselves.

This is not the case with video clips recorded by professional Canon, Sony, Panasonic and Red cameras.

This is for various reasons to do with large data rates, card file systems and stupid design by engineers who don’t have to use what they make.

Worse still, there’s a different complex folder and file structure for every camera manufacturer.  Multiple different proprietary standards.

Why?

You don’t get this kind of bullshit with a consumer product.  Consumers wouldn’t put up with it.  They shoot a clip, they want a single file for that clip copied to their computer, end of story.

But in this niche, we have to use what we’re given, and there aren’t enough of us to complain about it; still fewer who understand it enough to point out authoritatively how ridiculous it is.

So it continues, and people like us have to suck it up and make it work, even though it costs the production industry millions of hours and dollars in postproduction wastage every year.

And as I start to write this, I’m realising that – because of this insanity – I now have to actually describe what the word “Clip” is going to mean in this post, to avoid confusion.

When I’m talking about a Clip here, I’m talking about the bit of video and audio that the cameraperson recorded between the moment they pressed Record and the moment they pressed stop.

You’d think that this was a perfectly obvious statement – but unfortunately, over in the professional camera dimension, “Clip” is not a single file.

Yes, I guess probably the most important thing to know about a professional camera card format is:
There can be many files and folders that make up a single Clip.  

In Canon XF cameras, a clip is not just made up of a video/audio file, it’s also made up of a stack of metadata files, in a complex nested folder structure that must be retained intact for editing & media applications to be able to read it properly.

And worse, if a single clip is recorded for longer than 5 minutes 15 seconds, even just the video/audio part of it will not be made up of one file – it will start to be made up of several separate consecutive video/audio files.

And the problem is that if you don’t have all the right elements in exactly the right place in relation to each other, the card isn’t readable/mountable by any media software, including Premiere.  Your cards will no longer work the way they’re supposed to.  You won’t be able to view or import your clips.
So a 64GB card can’t be broken up into its constituent elements.  It has to remain a 64GB card.

As I said, this madness is not just Canon’s.  All the others have their own version of it.
In Panasonic P2 cards, they separate video and audio into separate folders; and then for good measure, they create separate audio files for every channel!
In Red, they split up a single clip into several consecutive video files, with a metadata file alongside.
In Sony, there’s a single video/audio file for each clip (hurray!), but it’s hidden among a forest of metadata files on several levels (boo!).

I’ve been having to explain all this recently to a MAM (Media Asset Management) system manufacturer, whom one of our clients wanted to be able to ingest professional video camera card folder structures, and it reminded me that this information is still just NOT OUT THERE.

Even Canon’s own Canon Professional Network site doesn’t contain it in their special education section – just info about their other less complex formats.  I raised it with a few people on their side years ago and tried to get more details direct from engineers, but with no luck.  In the end, I could figure most of it out myself, guessing at the purpose of one or two obscurely coded metadata files.

I had to do this because I was supporting the ingest of thousands of hours worth of footage, and was trying to build a script that would let us separate out individual clips, rename them, archive them individually, and then recombine them back into a single card.  It was important to try and save money and time in the archiving and restoring of petabytes of data. (See bottom)

After figuring out how all the formats work, I made my script work.  But of course, we then couldn’t roll it out as a supported application at the large media companies we support, in case I got hit by a car and nobody else knew how to support it in future.  It was not fundable, and too complicated.  If you’re interested in it, let me know.

But anyway, for those of you who are in the same position as I was, trying to figure out how a Canon XF card works and how to reconstruct it in order to support post production or fix a problem, this is how it works:

(I’d go and get a cup of tea, if I were you – we’re going to be here a while, and it’s not going to be much fun.)

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