The International Broadcast Convention is taking place this week in Amsterdam, and there are a variety of new products and announcements at the show. AJA released the Kona5 with 12G SDI, among smaller products. Canon released the XF705 camcorder shooting 4K in HDR and is showing their new full frame mirrorless DSLR camera, in the form of the EOS R. Sony announced the Trimaster HX as their top end HDR Mastering Monitor, and a new optional accessory to remote the sensor on their full frame Venice camera. Blackmagic-Design released their own RAW codec, for their cameras and software. While I was somewhat supportive of the idea of ProRes RAW when it was announced earlier this year, I am less enthusiastic about yet another RAW format entering the market, especially one that is clearly so proprietary. We need to consolidate the RAW options, not add new ones.
Adobe talked about the next update to the Creative Cloud apps, with a number of new improvements to Premiere Pro. The Lumetri color engine is getting number of new curves tools for selecting and refining individual colors. and better ways to stack and organize various various grading effects. Clip label colors are now visible when selected, making it easier to identify what you are working on. “Intelligent Audio Cleanup” should make is easier for users to improve the quality of their audio sources. The “Display Color Management” option is a first step in getting past Premiere’s fairly limited Rec.709 color-space, as the spectrum broadens across the rest of the workflow. There is now more support for hardware encoding and decoding of H.264 and HEVC files on newer Intel hardware. My AlexaLF files can now be directly imported into Premiere, which was an issue for my full frame camera tests last spring. They also added explicit support for Google’s VR180 format, which may someday be more popular than 360 video. There is a new effect for smoothly scaling vector images, and a little feature most won’t notice, is that they changed the way altering a sequence’s resolution alters the existing motion key frame values. The previous method of proportional changes measured from the center worked well for scaling projects from HD to UHD. The new method of fixed distances from the center will work better when resizing projects for different aspect ratios and deliverables. I didn’t request this change, but only because I didn’t think Adobe would do it. Obviously someone else did, and they listened. It would have saved me countless hours of work finishing my last feature film, as we delivered in three different aspect ratios.
