MASV Panel integrates the MASV file transfer service right into Adobe’s Premiere Pro, while maintaining the same speed and reliability. This enables users to send full Premiere projects, project sequences, or files from the bin with a few clicks. It is possible to export sequences to Media Encoder, and then automatically send the output files without the need to wait for them to render. MASV Panel – integrating file transfers into Premiere Pro MASV is an online service for delivering huge files (in fact, unlimited file sizes) over the internet. It is based on a pay-per-transfer model, to be precise, pay-per-download at the moment. In May 2019, my colleague Olaf, a long-time MASV user, published his MASV 3 review. Make sure to check it if you are interested in such a service. MASV’s creators are expanding the service with new features quite often. Recently, they added Slack integration, new desktop apps, and the ability to extend the 10-day delivery limit. For more information about the update, please read this article. Within this article, I will take a look at the latest update, which has brought MASV Panel – the Adobe Premiere Pro integration with the MASV service. What exactly does MASV Panel offer? MASV Panel – Sending Huge Files Directly from Premiere Pro With MASV Panel for Adobe Premiere Pro you can send full Premiere projects, project sequences, or files from your bin with a few clicks. When sending project sequences, MASV Panel enables selecting any export preset, exporting the sequences to Media Encoder, and then automatically sending the output files without the need to wait for them to render. MASV Panel uses the same code base as the MASV desktop application, which provides highly reliable transfers. It is no problem to change wifi locations, put the computer in sleep mode in the middle of a transfer, or work while using an unreliable cafe network. MASV runs on Amazon Web Services, which – according to MASV’s creators – offers high security trusted by large companies. The transferred and stored data is encrypted and complies with GDPR privacy guidelines. Sending files with MASV Panel The MASV Panel comes as part of the MASV membership, for no additional cost. The membership itself is free – MASV charges you $0.25 per gigabyte of data downloaded. The standard availability timeframe of transfers is 10 days. To extend the availability, you can pay $0.10 per gigabyte per month. More information on pricing can be found here. Do you already use MASV? How do you like it? Did you ever need to send an entire Premiere Pro project to someone via the internet? Let us know in the comments underneath the article.

Today, Red Giant Software released the latest addition to their already impressive collection of effects and grading suites. The Red Giant VFX Suite offers 9 freshly coded effects for immediate use in Adobe After Effects. Four of the nine also work in Premiere Pro. And all these effects can be tweaked and tailored to your specific needs, of course. The (very) impressive ‘Supercomp’ FX in action. Most of Red Giant’s software bundles aim for specific user needs. The ‘Trapcode Suite’ is for 3D motion graphics and most of its tools require Adobe After Effects as a host application. The ‘Shooters Suite‘ offers practical tools for working on set (Shooter Offload) and when entering post-production (Shooter PluralEyes for syncing audio or Shooter Instant 4K for example). The popular ‘Magic Bullet Suite‘ bundles cool, yet easy to build effects and color treatments for your post-pro pleasure. All of these tools can be purchased as individual tools of course. So what’s next you might ask. Well, the Red Giant VFX suite offers 9 brand new tools for serious After Effects pros while some of the new FX, namely the impressive ‘Supercomp’, still maintains Red Giant’s own and easy to follow workflow GUI, even for not-so-pros. Like me. In order to get you started right away, watch the intro video below: Red Giant VFX Suite First off, let’s get the probably most asked question out of the way here and the answer is: yes. All 9 plugins of the VFX suite come with a GPU-accelerated engine, so working with them smoothly and –even more importantly– getting results fast is key here. The Red Giant VFX Suite comes with nine tools in total: Supercomp Primatte Keyer 6 King Pin Tracker Spot Clone Tracker Optical Glow Chromatic Displacement Knoll light Factory 3.1 Shadow Reflection For me, the most impressive (and most innovative) plugin of the whole suite is called ‘Supercomp’. It’s a complete compositing environment that makes it easy to create complex, seamless composites. 1/ Supercomp If you’re familiar with Magic Bullet you’ll feel right at home here. You don’t need to pre-comp everything over and over.. a pretty common task in After Effects after all. With Supercomp you get everything you need within a nice effects UI but still within After Effects, no need to leave the app or roundtrip to a standalone FX app. It’a seamlessly integrated within After Effects, just like the other 8 plugins. You can drag’n’drop single effects to certain layers, rearrange everything, try different values, reorder layers, you name it. But the cool thing is that the resulting composition will update in real time, so you see exactly what you get. Effects like a 3-way color correction are built right in, same goes for chromatic and optical glows, fire effects, light wraps, volumetric fog, edge blends for merging foreground layers into background plates and many more. In order to conveniently control the vast amount of possible effects and tools within Supercomp, Red Giant build a context-aware rotary picker tool which is really handy to use instead of drop-down menus. 2/ Primatte Keyer 6 Primatte Keyer is already part of the Keying Suite but included in the Red Giant VFX Suite is the new version 6 of the plugin. Primatte Keyer is a tool for fast and pretty much automatic chroma-keying and both, green and blue screens can be used for it to work. Red Giant have updated the UI for cleaner looks and improved usability. On first click, Primatte tries to pull an automatic key in order to separate your subject from the background. While this first pass might be ok already you can tweak and refine the matte to your liking of course. Several tools assist you on the way, a brand new one is called Core Matte: It keeps the inside of your key solid while preserving fine semi-transparent details on the edges. in the above image you can see Core Matte in action controlling the fine details hair while preserving the inside of the key. Since the whole Red Giant VFX Suite is GPU optimized, users can expect a speedy Primatte 6, with previews and renders up to 3x faster than in previous versions, according to Red Giant. Primatte Keyer can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 3/ King Pin Tracker King Pin Tracker gives you fast, accurate planar tracking, right inside Adobe After Effects. It’s a bit like Red Giant’s Warp plugin (part of the ‘Effects Suite’) but much more sophisticated. With King Pin you can integrate 2D objects into your shot and it’s pretty simple, indeed. The object you want to integrate doesn’t even have to be rectangular and with the supplied “to” and “from” pins and the ability to rotate and/or offset your object in planar space it’s easy to pin whatever you want. King Pin won’t stop tracking at the edge of frame but will continue beyond the frame and it also will track surfaces in changing lighting accurately. Even a white wall will give King Pin something to hold on to, I’ve seen it in a demo Red Giant hosted prior to the release. Pretty impressive, indeed. 4/ Spot Clone Tracker This tool of the Red Giant VFX Suite does exactly what you think it does: It tracks moving objects within your footage and replaces them with a defined target. Think clone stamp tool in Adobe Photoshop. Easily fix blemishes or remove small, unwanted items. Spot Clone Tracker tries to match your lighting automatically, with options for how it clones light, color and texture. You also can add transparency to blend your target in smoothly. 5/ Optical Glow Optical Glow adds realistic (and therefore beautiful) glows to your composition. With built-in gamma management, glows look realistic in all kinds of footage: log or linear. Optical Glow offers lots of control for making lightsabers, starship engines, police lights, neon signs and more with beautiful, photo-realistic results. Again, if you ever have used a Red Giant tool before, you will find yourself right at home. Adding a glow to things make them blend more naturally with their environment. That’s actually the main core feature of the whole Red Giant VFX Suite: Blend things into other things with tons of options and realistic results (even if ‘realistic’ means a giant Transformers-style robot standing in a lake next to some mountains and holding a ridiculously large glowing saber-like weapon, shown in the aforementioned demo hosted by Red Giant). Optical Glow can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 6/ Chromatic Displacement Chromatic Displacement uses one layer to displace the pixels of another, while smoothly separating out the colors. The displacement image is being used as a height map here, which gives you nice looking, organic results. Chromatic Displacement was designed for creating professional visual effects, such as force fields, heat ripples, light refractions, cloaking effects, and much more – but it’s also good for motion graphics. The above effect looks really cool and I think without this plugin is pretty hard to build from scratch. The tools of the Red Giant VFX Suite makes things a bit easier as they try to achieve realistic results with a few clicks while still maintaining a vast list of options for variation. Furthermore, since the whole suite is fully integrated with Adobe After Effects you can deploy any tool/command/effect you want on top of the Red Giant VFX, of course. Chromatic Displacement can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 7/ Knoll Light Factory 3.1 Knoll Light Factory is a tool for creating photo-realistic lens flares. Thanks to the aforementioned GPU acceleration you get these flares and light effects in less time and since these effects try to mimic real-life lens designs  it all blends together nicely. With the build-in lens editor, you can create your very own flares from scratch, or customize one of the (many) included presets which are clearly inspired by quite a few blockbusters of past years. Knoll Light Factory 3.1 can also be used in Adobe Premiere Pro. 8/ Shadow Shadow is a plugin for After Effects that makes it easy to add a perspective shadow in front of or behind a layer, based on its alpha channel, brightness, and more. With options for softness, bend, length, color and many other properties, the Shadow effect extends the various shadow tools available inside After Effects. 9/ Reflection Last but not least, Reflection is a plugin for After Effects that makes it easy to add a reflection to your layers. Bundled with it, controls for softness, distance fade, length and more are available. Again, this tool might not be the do-it-all super-tool but it solves a common task for motion graphic artists and the vast but dedicated options make it easy to work with this plugin. Pricing and Availability The Red Giant VFX Suite is available now and you can download it over at redgiant.com. The full version is $999 but there’s also an academic version available which will set you back $449. All tools are available for purchase individually, too: Supercomp $399 Primatte Keyer &199 King Pin Tracker $199 Spot Clone Tracker $99 Optical Glow $99 Chromatic Displacement $99 Knoll Light Factory $199 Shadow $99 Reflection $99 All nine tools of the Red Giant VFX Suite run on both Windows and MacOS machines and require Adobe After Effects CC 2018 and later as a host application. Knoll Light Factory, Primatte Keyer, Optical Glow and Chromatic Displacement also work in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 and later. If you want to take a deep dive into these new tools, I highly recommend a visit to Stu Maschwitz’ Prolost.com. Stu is a veteran in the VFX industry and currently serves as the Chief Creative Officer of Red Giant. Basically, he’s one of the creative minds behind the new Red Giant VFX Suite. A 52-min tutorial on Supercomp can be found on his site. Link: redgiant.com | Prolost.com What do you think? Do you use any of Red Giant’s products already? Would you use any of these new tools for your workflow? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Syncly Music is not just another stock music library or music licensing platform. Of course, they have some cool songs for your next project, but this platform aimed at filmmakers is bringing something new with a robust integration directly into Premiere Pro. Also, you can customize the tracks by removing instruments or increasing the tempo. Let’s take a look. What Is Syncly Music Syncly Music is a new platform designed from the ground up with filmmakers in mind. They know that budgets are often really tights for independent content creators. Most of the time, you only have the budget to buy a pre-existing soundtrack, and you try to make it fit your film as best as you can. Do you remember the countless hours looking for the perfect track for your film? How many times did you hear an awesome song and all of a sudden, an instrument kicks in and ruins what you had in mind? What if you could mute that instrument? This is the idea behind Syncly Music; create something else. A platform where you could pick a song, and adjust it to your likings, with one goal: make it sound unique. Syncly Music soundtracks are not “baked-in”; they are based on stems. If you are not familiar with what a stem is, it is a discrete or grouped collection of audio sources mixed all together. For example, the “acoustic guitar” stem in one song can be all the guitar tracks of a particular guitar. Same goes for every other instrument. This stem technology behind Syncly Music is what allows you to reduce the volume of an instrument in a track, or mute it entirely. Syncly Music For Filmmakers There are two ways to use Syncly Music: directly on their website, or via an extension inside of Adobe Premiere Pro. As a filmmaker, option two makes more sense to me. All you have to do is install the extension, open it in Premiere Pro – a small window pops up – you sign-in to your account, and you immediately have access to all the music libraries. You can search for songs by type, mood, instrument, or browse the various existing libraries. Each library contains six tracks. Once you select a track, it plays automatically. On the right, next to the song, you have three choices: you can download it as it is, share it with someone else via email, or customize it. This customize button is the real deal here. By clicking it, a menu opens with every stems from the track you selected. That way, you can “create” your version by lowering the volume of each instrument or muting some tracks. Don’t like vocals? Mute it. Syncly Music has told me that a VST version is coming in the next few months. You will have the ability to keyframe instruments directly inside of Premiere Pro. I’m curious to see how it will work. Indeed, if you are in a hurry and want a quick preview of some versions of the song, there are 3 “pre-built” versions of each song. These are located at the bottom of the interface under the “customize” button. You have the choice between full, underscore, and sparse version of the song. Finally, next to this customize button is a slider for adjusting the tempo by plus or minus 15%. It allows you to speed up or slow down a song quickly. Once you are done, all you have to do is click the download button, and your track is ready. The beautiful thing is it imports directly inside of Adobe Premiere Pro (and asks you where you want to save the file on your computer). Also, when you download a track, they automatically send you an email with a license for the record you just downloaded. So, you can use it professionally in any project you like. Room for Improvements Is Syncly Music perfect? Of course, it’s not. During my trial, I wished that for preview purposes, the Syncly Music extension could synchronize with my video/playhead in the timeline without the need to do it manually. When I wanted to see if a track fitted my video, I needed to go to the beginning of my timeline, hit Play for my video in Premiere, and quickly hit Play in the Syncly extension. That’s annoying. Also, I’d like to see the initial BPM next to each track, even if there is a waveform in the extension. It will make my life more comfortable if I’m searching for something slow, for example. Pricing and Availability Like most music providers these days, Syncly Music is based on a subscription plan. If you have limited music needs or want to try it out, the Basic Plan is free and allows you to download one track every month. You can use the soundtracks for personal projects and can’t use them for commercial/paid projects. The Premium Plan is $25 per month or $240 per year. It allows you to download as much content as you need, and use the songs in any project you want. Syncly Music is available right now on their website. What do you think of this new approach at soundtracks licensing for filmmakers? Do you already have a licensing plan anywhere else? Did you try it out? Let us know in the comments below!

Adobe has announced changes to their Creative Cloud applications. From now on, Creative Cloud customers will only have direct download access to the two most recent major versions of Creative Cloud desktop applications. Creative Cloud changes applications availability. Source: Adobe For Creative Cloud users it was possible to download older versions of the applications included in their subscription. Not anymore. On Wednesday, May 8th, Adobe’s CC communications team published the following note on their blog: A Creative Cloud subscription offers numerous benefits, including frequent product updates with new features and capabilities, critical bug fixes and important security updates. We recommend all customers use the latest release of Creative Cloud for optimal performance and benefits. Please note that going forward, Creative Cloud customers will only have direct download access (from the Creative Cloud Desktop app and Adobe.com) to the two most recent major versions of Creative Cloud desktop applications.* Focusing our efforts on the latest two major releases of Creative Cloud applications, which the vast majority of Adobe customers are already using, will further enable us to develop the features and functionality most requested by customers and ensure peak performance and benefits across Windows and Mac operating systems. Business customers in need of an older version of a Creative Cloud application should contact their IT Administrator to see if one is available. *Exception: Only the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat is available for download. This decision might cause some problems for some Creative Cloud users who wanted to continue using an older version of Premiere Pro or other CC applications. Adobe, of course, always wants their customers to use the latest version of their applications. With Premiere Pro there is, however, a lot of feedback from filmmakers reporting about stability issues with the latest versions. Personally, I also use Premiere Pro CC and I usually don’t download the latest version right away, as I am worried it may contain stability issues. Source: Adobe What do you think of Adobe’s recent decision? Is it going to be limiting for your work? Let us know in the comments underneath the article.

Adobe presented their new features and enhancements in the Creative Cloud applications during NAB 2019 in Las Vegas. We met up with Patrick Palmer from Adobe and talked a bit more about the updates and stability improvements in Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe released a rather large software update for their Creative Cloud applications prior to NAB 2019. In our interview during NAB, we only focused on the video editing software Adobe Premiere Pro. If you want to see all the new features and enhancements for all the other video-oriented applications (Adobe After effects, Adobe Audition, and Adobe Character Animator) make sure to check our main Adobe Creative Cloud updates article from April. Patrick told us their team really focused on fixing the stability issues, which is a much-discussed topic when it comes to Adobe Premiere. As an example, Adobe introduced a built-in analysis tool, which can tell users if there is an old or problematic version of the GPU drivers which could potentially cause stability or other issues with Premiere. Updating the GPU drivers can often improve the GPU acceleration and overall editing speed when handling high resolution, high bitrate footage in Premiere. We were also assured, that Adobe listens to their users and they take customer feedback seriously. They introduced the feedback platform called UserVoice one year ago and it proved to be very useful. One example is the new Adobe Premiere feature called Rulers and guides, which has been requested by many Premiere users and so Adobe decided to implement it in the new version. This new feature is even compatible and transferable between Premiere and After Effects. Other new Premiere Pro feature is called Freeform Project. Its purpose is to help visually organize and storyboard the media and save layouts for shot selects. Having a form of an open canvas it should ease the process of brainstorming story ideas, and assembly edits. Clips in Freeform panel can have different sizes and color code and they can be stacked in groups which will make the editing process more visual. Adobe further introduced improved Text tool for better workflow with fonts, faster mask tracking for Lumetri Color and effects with better GPU acceleration, better audio handling and more. Again, for a complete list of new Adobe Premiere Pro features and improvements, see our main Adobe Creative Cloud updates article from April. All the new features are already available with the latest update in Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe has been usually releasing firmware updates twice a year, so we can expect the next one again sometime around IBC 2019. What would you like to see in the next Adobe Premiere Pro update? What do you think of the new updated Adobe Premiere? Did you notice an improvement in stability? Are you using any of the new features? Let us know in the comments underneath the article.

After the recent announcement of CineMatch – a plugin that makes camera color matching easy – the team at FilmConvert revealed FilmConvert Nitrate. This new version is an upgrade of the original FilmConvert plugin. Let’s take a look at what’s new! FilmConvert Nitrate New Features FilmConvert has been out since 2012, and the company is continuously adding new camera-specific packages. Otherwise, the plugin by itself is pretty much the same since the beginning. This new FilmConvert Nitrate version is a much welcome upgrade of a fantastic film simulation plugin that we’ve been using since the very beginning. The first thing you will notice with Nitrate is the overall UI redesign: more colors in the plugins for more fun. Also, there are new tools for more fine control over the final image. In the Nitrate update, there are now Log versions of the original film stock emulations. It means that you can now control the amount of contrast and saturation that you apply to the film stock you choose with more precision. Finally, FilmConvert Nitrate now uses a full Log image processing pipeline – like DaVinci Resolve – so the entire dynamic range of your footage is preserved throughout the grading process. FilmConvert Nitrate Log Mode. Image credit: FilmConvert To achieve that, there is now a new custom curve control tool. The three color wheels for Shadows/Mid-tones/Highlights adjustments can sometimes be fiddly. This new custom curve controls will let you adjust the footage’s highlight/shadow roll-offs easily for example. If you don’t want the film grain to be too strong or applied to all parts of your footage, there is a new film grain control. It lets you adjust where in the Shadows/Mid-tones/Highlights the grain is applied. Pricing and Availability At the moment, there is no final information about FilmConvert Nitrate’s pricing and availability. However, if you already own the “old” FilmConvert plugin, there will be an upgrade fee to get the new Nitrate plugin. If you purchase FilmConvert from now on – $159 for the complete bundle – you will receive a free upgrade to Nitrate. The Nitrate upgrade will first be available for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects on Mac OS and Windows. Additional platforms will be upgraded during 2019. Discount Code – 10% off for cinema5D Readers! The team from FilmConvert was also kind enough to give cinema5D readers an exclusive DISCOUNT CODE to get 10% off all purchases from the FilmConvert website. Simply add the discount code “CINEMA5D” on checkout or click this link to apply the discount. Do you already own and use FilmConvert? What do you think of the Nitrate upgrade? Let us know in the comments below!  

CineMatch, a FilmConvert company, is an Adobe Premiere Pro plugin that will save you time when trying to match color between different cameras. The idea is to select your main camera, choose the manufacturer/model, same goes for your B camera, and let the plugin magically convert the colors. CineMatch Makes Technical LUTs a Thing of the Past CineMatch is a one-click plugin solution to match different camera in post-production, easily. The first version has been launched at NAB 2019, and it is pretty impressive. The plugin will first be available for Adobe Premiere Pro, with future support for FCPX, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer and more on the way. CineMatch is not merely a set of LUTs; it contains dedicated profiles for each camera based on it sensor and not by comparing the light situation of the scene.  Currently, the list of supported cameras includes the Sony a7 III, the Panasonic GH5, the FUJIFILM X-T3, the Nikon Z 6, and the BMPCC 4K. I do not doubt that the list will quickly expand. Who is CineMatch for? If you are an editor, colorist, DIT technician, DP, or independent filmmaker, it can save you time. The first sample footages are impressive. It doesn’t matter if you shoot on one camera in LOG and the other in a Rec.709 profile. So, choose the picture profile that suits your scene and let the plugin do the magic for you. Also, no need to rent the same camera multiple times, shoot with what you have at your disposal and apply it in post-production. There is no information from CineMatch about pricing and availability at the moment. We can’t wait to get our hands on it and make a review – stay tuned for more info. Do you think CineMatch can save you time in post-production? Which camera do you wish was implemented in the plugin? Let us know in the comments down below!

ProRes RAW was announced a year ago at NAB 2018. While this format is impressive, the actual camera and NLE support have been very slow. At NAB 2019, we got a chance to talk about the future of it with Atomos’ CEO Jeromy Young. ProRes RAW vs. RAW ProRes RAW is a new flavor of the popular ProRes codecs. This new ProRes format is a more manageable and editable type of RAW, just like other ProRes codecs. If you need high-quality footage that is a reasonable size, while maintaining some flexibility in post, this recording format can be a solid option. Atomos was the first company to support ProRes RAW recording. A year later, implementation into cameras has been very slow, and no camera or company supports internal recording excepts DJI’s Zenmuse X7. Some cameras like the Nikon Z6/Z7 supports external PR RAW recording, as well as the Panasonic EVA1. In terms of software support, Final Cut Pro was the only NLE to support it at launch. Nowadays, a few other software companies support it, including Filmlight’s Baselight, Assimilate’s SCRATCH, Grass Valley’s Edius, and Colorfront’s Transkoder. But, Adobe software including Premiere Pro and After Effects still doesn’t support it. As Jeromy Young said, Adobe might handle it in the future. However, a major missing software is Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve, probably because they developed Blackmagic RAW. ProRes RAW vs. Blackmagic RAW ProRes RAW “version 1.0” as Jeromy Young calls it, is the first step into a new ecosystem. Atomos is trying to push this new flavor of ProRes as hard as possible, and more and more cameras should support external recording in the future. However, the introduction of Blackmagic RAW could complicate things a bit for Atomos. Jeromy Young doesn’t call BM RAW a “competition,” and it looks like Atomos is not closed to support it in the future if customers want it, but they want to push ProRes RAW first. Is DaVinci Resolve ever going to support ProRes RAW? I’m not sure. In the end, it does not mean both formats will not co-exist in the future as they are fundamentally different – BM RAW only supports Blackmagic cameras, while ProRes RAW can support nearly every camera. A good example is the addition of an external recording RAW option for RED cameras. Did you already shoot in ProRes RAW? What do you think about its future? Let us know in the comments down below!