Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
133 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE 133 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE TECH TIPS (since every Creative Cloud subscriber automatically owns a copy), and the fact that Adobe diligently continued to develop its professional features, it has risen in popularity. Today it is used by production companies, advertising agencies, television stations and independent editors around the world. Premiere is well known as being format-friendly and cooperates well with its Creative Cloud brethren such as Photoshop, Illustrator and, most importantly, After Effects. All of these reasons have contributed to Premiere Pro's success. Let's start with color grading in Premiere Pro. Soon after Adobe acquired SpeedGrade's color-grading software, they went to work implementing a subset of its sophisticated color tools directly into Premiere Pro. The result was the Lumetri color palette, which gives users a remarkable amount of color-correction tools within Premiere Pro (without having to roundtrip to separate color-correction software). Along with things like color temperature, contrast and brightness, curves, and primary and secondary corrections, you could make selective color adjustments to a specific range of colors that you want to adjust — for example, skin tones. Previously, this was done with a single Hue/ Saturation tool. However, in the new version of Premiere Pro, selective color grading has been expanded with new tools that offer greater precision and more control. This was done by pairing values such as Hue vs. Hue and Luma vs. Saturation on two (horizontal and vertical) axes (see Figure 2). Premiere Pro now has tools to create end-to-end VR180 video. "Wait a second," I hear you say, "don't you mean VR360 video?" No. In case you haven't heard, Google has introduced a new VR format called VR180. Basically, it sounds kind of like what it is, a video that contains half the field of view of a 360-degree video. Most of us have heard about or experienced 360 VR video (or immersive video). Whether you have donned a VR headset at a trade show or on a home entertainment system (or stuck your phone into a cardboard viewer), VR or 360 video allows you to turn your head in any direction to witness what is happening around you. However, much of what you may be interested in viewing often doesn't exist behind you at all, but rather in a 180-degree field in front of you. Consider a concert, for instance. You might want to watch the lead singer, then shift your gaze over to the lead guitarist. After a while, you might want to check out the drummer. Only seldomly, if at all, would you want to turn and face directly behind you. In fact, if you did that at a real concert, you would not only look weird, you might miss something important. The VR180 format acknowledges this by doing away with the non-essential and restricting the viewing angle only to the 180 degrees in front of you rather than a full 360-degree immersion. It is also a 3D stereoscopic format. With VR180, not only are you less distracted by things you probably wouldn't want to watch in the first place, but there is half as much data to store and process, relieving the burden on your system's resources (see Figure 3). Premiere Pro now includes support for VR180, including optimized ingest, editing, and effects for both monoscopic and stereoscopic VR180 content. When you're finished editing, you can output in the Google VR180 format so your creation can be viewed on YouTube or other VR180 platforms. Like Premiere Pro's previously existing support for VR360 content, you can view 180 media on your screen (without a headset) as flat equirectangular images or in rectilinear VR view. Or you can work while donning a VR headset in Adobe's Immersive Work Environment. Speaking of the Adobe Immersive Environment (180 or 360), the new version of Premiere Pro now allows Figure 2: Color grading in Premiere Pro has been enhanced with new tools that allow you to modify color ranges, making it easier to select specific hues. Figure 3: Premiere Pro now supports editing and production of Google VR180 video, a new format that has half the field of view of VR360.