When Adobe bought IRIDAS’ tech earlier this year, colorists ears perked up at the idea of Adobe implementing SpeedGrade into its Production Premium suite of video products. It’s been crickets since then though.
Last week, however, Colin Smith published the below video on Adobe TV entitled “Introduction to Speedgrade.”
After watching the 20 minute video, I was pretty stoked at what Adobe is doing with this tech. However, I can’t find anything else about it anywhere. Colin Smith calls it part of the Adobe tools and mentions that its part of Production Premium at the end of the video. As far as I can tell though, there’s no mention of it anywhere else via Adobe’s official channels.
Back to SpeedGrade itself though. I think it looks great now; however, I’m still left wondering how this will be integrated with the other Production Premium programs – specifically Premiere Pro and After Effects.
After watching this introduction video, I had to go back and read Stu Maschwitz’s initial thoughts on Adobe’s acquisition of IRIDAS’ tech. It’s spot on with solid recommendations on what Adobe should do with SpeedGrade – specifically this part:
Encapsulate the SpeedGrade color correction controls into clip properties that make sense in Premiere. This should not be an “effect” any more that we should have to apply an effect to change an audio clip’s volume or stereo panning. In other words, do what Apple did in FCP X.
While we snarl at FCP X for a lot of things, the tight integration of color correction on the per-clip basis is useful (if still clunky thanks to Apple’s interface).
While I like After Effects plugins like Color Finesse, I’d like to see something that’s more at home in Premiere Pro. From the early looks in the video above, that may not be where the first generation of SpeedGrade will be when is ships (presumably with CS6 in Spring 2012). But hopefully that’s where it will head in the future.
From Colin Smith’s commentary, it’s pretty clear that SpeedGrade is up and running as an Adobe program and it sure sounds like it is a part of an early version of Production Premium CS6. If that’s the case, we should be hearing more about it early 2012 – certainly by the time NAB 2012 rolls around in April.
I’ll leave you with a block quote below from the IRIDAS acquisition press release that hypes some of the “what’s coming” stuff for video editors (my emphasis added).
With the addition of IRIDAS technology, Adobe® Creative Suite® Production Premium and Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection, the world’s leading video tools for professionals, are expected to gain a comprehensive set of tools so video editors can manipulate color and light for any type of content, including professional film and television. The addition of premier color grading tools exemplifies Adobe’s commitment and leadership in the digital film and video space.
“Adobe has set the standard for rich communication and collaboration across all media and we’ve been rapidly innovating on solutions for professional filmmakers,” said Jim Guerard, vice president and general manager for professional video and audio, Creative and Media Solutions Business Unit, Adobe. “The integration of IRIDAS’ leading color grading technology helps us continue to deliver high quality tools and redefines how professionals in the motion picture and video industry view, manipulate, enhance and produce their digital creations from script to screen.”
The addition of IRIDAS technology includes SpeedGrade, an award-winning toolset for Stereo 3D, RAW processing, color grading and finishing of digital content. IRIDAS offers the only non-destructive tools for primary and secondary color correction that are optimized for multi-core CPU and GPU performance, paralleling the industry-leading speed and efficiency of the Adobe Premiere® Pro and Adobe Mercury Playback Engine software.
“Joining forces with Adobe provides us with an amazing opportunity to get our technology into more peoples’ hands,” said Lin Sebastian Kayser, chief executive officer, IRIDAS. “Adobe has demonstrated real commitment to the professional film and video market with its recent releases and has a known track record of integrating acquired technologies. With the addition of our color grading technology I believe Production Premium can lead the HDR video and stereoscopic charge as the film and professional video industry evolves.”
This now gives me an interesting dilemma and pause (for the time being) and not make a future purchase of Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 and Magic Bullet Colorista II.
I will take wait and see approach until SpeedGrade comes out . Like any other program you have to play around with and learn it, however, the interface (despite portions of itself expanding and collapsing) seems more busy as opposed to Red Giant’s cleaner interface.
I wonder, too, how SpeedGrade will be packaged with Production Premium and at what price point.
AWESOME REPORT!!! Great job guys!!