Using these adjustments, I was able to warm up my test subject and reduce a bit of glare from the hair light without flattening out detail or contrast. Many other finetuning controls for saturation, contrast, and temperature let you make global adjustments to your overall footage. The controls on the wheels move much more smoothly than the typical three-color plug-ins most video editors are used to, but holding down the Shift key lets you ramp up movement exponentially, if needed. Once you’re in the Look panel, the controls look and feel more familiar-Offset, Gamma, and Gain wheels adjust the overall shadows, midtones, and highlights very subtly. Adobe TV provides several how-to and getting started videos, which will help you get up and running.
However, this is where you really need some instruction on how to use the program, as many of these steps will not be intuitive for editors jumping into SpeedGrade for the first time. If you add it above the top layer, it will create a segmented layer that mirrors all the edits in the sequence.Īpply a Primary grading layer to the footage sequence by clicking and dragging the Grading icon from the Setup panel. If you add it to just an edited clip segment of the sequence layer, it will only affect that clip. Once your project opens in SpeedGrade, you can click and drag the Grading icon from the Setup panel to the timeline to add a Primary grading layer.
You can send footage clips or complete edited sequences in Premiere Pro CS6 directly to SpeedGrade, retaining all the edits. This could take awhile, depending on the amount of content and edits in your sequence. This will save a SpeedGrade Project file (.ircp), which will open directly in SpeedGrade once it’s completed. To use this feature from inside Premiere Pro CS6, select the footage clip or sequence you wish to grade, select the Send to Adobe SpeedGrade option from the File pulldown menu, and choose a destination. You can also open individual clips directly in SpeedGrade. Adobe has also added a Send to SpeedGrade feature in Premiere Pro CS6, which maintains all edit points. While SpeedGrade can be used on most any footage file type, Adobe has incorporated an edit decision list (EDL) file workflow with Premiere Pro CS6 that maintains all the edit points to allow you to grade cuts separately on the timeline. The learning curve may be too steep for most editors, and if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you won’t get optimum results over using the basic three-way color corrector. Clearly, Adobe is aiming for a more sophisticated video production crowd with the entire CS6 suite and this tool is an enticement for those in the know-pulling in customers from Final Cut, and also from Avid. With SpeedGrade, you can add masking, vignettes, and even color grade 3D stereo pairs. But if you want amazing color grading for your footage and edited projects, and don’t mind a bit of a learning curve to achieve it, then SpeedGrade will definitely make your day. It is generally more advanced than what is needed by most video editors using a basic three-way color corrector plug-in with a non-linear editing system.
This program is aimed at high-end professional video editors, film producers, and filmmakers. Using what Adobe calls the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, SpeedGrade allows you to perform professional color grading on your video footage-either in its raw format or as an edited composition derived from Premiere Pro CS6 ( ). But following that company’s purchase by Adobe, SpeedGrade is now included with the CS6 Production Premium, Master Collection, and Creative Cloud bundles, or sold separately for $999.
Adobe SpeedGrade CS6 is a color grading software program that used to cost upwards of $20,000 when it was sold as a professional stand-alone package from Iridas.