I'm already hard at work talking with people in the broadcasting world, helping people as they add or transition to the Adobe video production workflows. Adobe has seen some amazing gains in the broadcasting space, including relationships with the BBC, CNN, Hearst-Argyle, and more. I'm hoping to help grow that area in the future.

I'll still be creating more episodes of AdobeTV shows, and I'm still active on Twitter (KarlSoule) for anyone needing to get a hold of me quickly.

David Helmly has a great video demonstrating the use of the new Premiere 4.2 features here:

Jason will be presenting at the FCP Supermeet in London on Thursday, June 25th. Check it out!

I'm gonna stretch out a couple of posts over the next few days, so stay tuned for some fun stuff coming your way!

One of the most exciting new features is the new enhanced RED support. Anyone using the initial release of the RED plug-in knows that Premiere Pro uses a 'virtual proxy' system, where Premiere Pro imports and works with the full resolution R3D files, and the plug-in tricks Premiere Pro into thinking the files are a lower resolution (chosen by the user) for a good editing experience on different levels of hardware. I've edited full 4k files on my laptop (using 1/8 resolution) and had a great experience. However, the initial plug-in required Premiere Pro to shut down in order to change the working resolution of the clips.

The new plug-in and support in 4.1 eliminates all of the bothersome restarts to change the working resolution. It's all handled now in the Source and Preview monitor menus directly, and can be switched on-the-fly in the middle of editing without closing the app. Plus, the media browser now understands RED card structure, making it even easier to preview clips. Lastly, it also enables the ability to alter the color profile of the RAW clip directly in Premiere Pro! There are color, ISO, and White Balance sliders in the Source Settings panel for creating custom color profiles, and applying them across multiple clips simultaneously.

In addition to RED support, there are also new features for Avid interoperability, including support for AAF sequence import from Media Composer without having to rerender media. There's also some nice architecture fixes that finally enable CS4 to work with HD capture boards from AJA, Black Magic, and Matrox video cards.

NAB Madness is upon us!

Here's a schedule of where I'll be presenting and when:

Monday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am - Accelerated Tapeless Workflows: Go from Shoot to Edit Faster in Premiere Pro CS4
9:30am - Everyday Timesavers: Edit Faster with the Top Timesaving Features in CS4 Production Premium
11:00am - The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm - Technology Sneak Peeks: See What's Coming in Adobe Creative Software

(In the FCP SuperBooth)
5:00pm - Integrating Adobe Production Premium into your FCP Workflow

Tuesday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am - Life without Walls: Open Workflows with Avid and Apple
9:30am - Everyday Timesavers: Edit Faster with the Top Timesaving Features in CS4 Production Premium
11:00am - The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm - Technology Sneak Peeks: See What's Coming in Adobe Creative Software

Wednesday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am - Accelerated Tapeless Workflows: Go from Shoot to Edit Faster in Premiere Pro CS4
11:00am - The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm - Technology Sneak Peeks: See What's Coming in Adobe Creative Software

(In the FCP SuperBooth)
3:20pm - Integrating Adobe Production Premium into your FCP Workflow

I'll also be presenting at the RED Supermeet Wednesday night.

Thursday
(In the Adobe Booth Theatre)
9:00am - Life without Walls: Open Workflows with Avid and Apple
11:00am - The RED Workflow from On‐Set to Finish with CS4 Production Premium (With Ted Shilowitz & Lucas Wilson)
12:00pm - Technology Sneak Peeks: See What's Coming in Adobe Creative Software

I'll also be hanging out at the pods around the back of the Adobe theatre each afternoon, so come by and say hi!

By the way, AdobeTV is now 1 year old! 1 year ago last week, Adobe launched the AdobeTV site with 210 videos. Today, Adobe TV has almost 3,000 videos, including offerings in English, German, Japanese and French. The content is growing weekly, and all of the evangelists just wrapped up shooting new episodes in the brand-new studio in San Francisco.

This week is a prep week for NAB, which will be action-packed. In addition to many presentations in the Adobe Theatre, I'll also be attending user group meetings for FCP and RED users, presenting in the FCP SuperBooth, and also covering a couple of Adobe-specific user group meetings. I'll be posting a full schedule later in the week.

On a completely unrelated note, I ordered a gift for my friend and coworker, Jason Levine, way back in December. It was backordered until very recently, and now it's sitting on my desk. I'm going to present it to him at NAB, but I thought I'd have some fun in the meantime seeing if he can guess what it is. Here's one of the very blurry photos I've sent Jay over the past couple of weeks:

Any guesses?

The difficulty, unfortunately, was on our side, and I want to bring this to everyone's attention in case others have run into this. There's a small notice on the trial download site that often gets overlooked:

"The trial versions of Adobe After Effects CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and Soundbooth CS4 do not include some features that depend on software licensed from parties other than Adobe. For example, some codecs for encoding MPEG formats are available only with the full version of these products. HDV, XDCAM, and AVCHD formats and sequence presets are not supported in the trial for both Mac OS and Windows®. Adobe Media Encoder export does not include MPEG-4, MPEG-2, MPEG-2 DVD, or MPEG-2 Blu-ray as export formats in the trial. The file importer does not recognize file types that are not included in trial mode (such as MPEG and XDCAM files). HDV is not included as a capture format in the Mac OS version of the trial."

What does this mean? Unfortunately, many of the codecs that are included in the full versions of the program are NOT INCLUDED with the trial version. This is due to licensing issues - these codecs are licensed from other companies, and those companies do not allow us to distribute them freely with the trial versions of our software.

If you are trying to evaluate any of these formats:
HDV
XDCAM
AVCHD
You will NOT be able to use the trial version of Production Premium to do so. Those codecs and timeline sequence presets don't even show up in the trial version of the software. I would recommend going to an authorized Adobe dealer and getting some time there with the full version of the software.

This is an unfortunate situation to be in, and Adobe is looking into ways we can enable customers to get a better trial experience. Many other NLE makers no longer supply trial versions because of these licensing issues. However, Adobe has been committed to keeping a trial version available.

I usually shoot a lot of video on my travels, but I rarely have enough time to get anything produced before I'm off to the next event. This time, I made the time on the flight back. This edit is VERY rough, and I wanted to insert some of the great photos that were taken into it. This was shot on my HV-30, all handheld (it really shows - sorry for all the shakycam!) and captured into Premiere Pro as a single clip, which I then created a massive amount of subclips from. In CS4, subclips perform just great, plus I added metadata to each of the subclips, so my media can be organized by location, content (buildings, people, etc.)

Here's the video:

You'll see Rufus, Paul, and myself, plus Roman and Olga from the local office. Both Roman and Olga took personal time to show us around Moscow, each on different days. Thanks again, Roman & Olga!

The music track used is "As the Rush Comes" by a group called Motorcycle. Copyright by Armada Music, and the track is available for purchase and download here: http://www.armadadownloads.com/

Let's start with a picture of Rufus, where the green has already been removed. Look at the color of the edge of the hair, and the side of Rufus's face. It has a green tinge to it.

Start by loading up the ESSENTIALS workspace in Photoshop CS4. This includes the Adjustments Panel, and the Masks Panel is in a tab in the same location.

Go to the Adjustments panel, and add a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Click the check box to colorize. Set the saturation to about 65, and the Lightness to about 60. The Hue used will depend on the type of color spill in the original image. If you picture a color wheel, what we are doing is adding the opposite color to the image. So for blue spill, use a lemon yellow color - something around 60. For Green, use a magenta - something around 270.

Now, let's mask the color. With the Adjustment Layer still selected, go to the Masks panel, and click the button to Create a Pixel Mask. Click on Color Range, and in the Select drop-down menu, select Green. This will give us the start of our mask.

Now, go back to the Hue/Saturation panel, and play with the saturation and lighting. You want to add enough Magenta to the image to cancel out the green, but not so much that the hair turns purple. There may be areas that are not affected yet - that's because the mask isn't perfect. We'll fix that in the next step. For now, worry about the areas that are being affected, and get the saturation value in the right ballpark.

Select the mask in the Layers panel by clicking on the mask icon in the adjustment layer.

Select the paint brush, and set the brush color to white. Set the opacity to about 10%. Paint over any remaining areas where green is still showing in the hair or skin. For example, in this image of rufus, the right edge of his face is getting a touch of green spill that isn't currently being affected enough by the adjustment layer. Paint over this area. If you overpaint, and his face turns magenta, switch the brush color to black and repaint. Also, play with the opacity of the brush if necessary.