Warning: Premiere Pro 2015.3 removes Speedgrade integration and has no backward compatibility

[Seneca_lives]

The latest PPro update (2015.3, updated today) creates project files that can't be read by the latest version of Speedgrade (not updated today or since whenever). It also removes the "Direct Link to Speedgrade" option from its menus. This means, that as of today, Adobe is effectively without a color grading solution.

The new PPro does provide support for Tangent control surfaces - including full customization through the Tangent Mapper application - which is in itself a very good thing. However, this was apparently enough for Adobe to decide that Direct Link and Speedgrade are no longer needed and this is simply not the case.

This leaves any remaining Speedgrade users and colorists in general with very few options:

1. For now, I recommend you reinstall the 2015.2 versions of Premiere/AE/AME through Creative Cloud to finish any current projects - they can exist side by side, at least - but that still means missing out on any new features and compatibility with client files. This is clearly not a sustainable solution. And Premiere versions are linked to After Effects versions, so you'll also lose out there...

2. Use Speedgrade the old-fashioned way, in native mode, using EDLs or exporting DPX. Which was never an ideal solution back in de CS6 days, but the world has moved on even if Speedgrade hasn't, and Speedgrade has no way of dealing with many more recent file formats (MXF being the most prominent). Sad to say this is simply not an option on many projects. Never mind that the roundtrip functionality and flexibility of Direct Link is gone, which was really Speedgrade's biggest selling point.

3. Try to grade in Premiere. Not really an option for serious work: Premiere's Lumetri implementation currently lacks support for layers (other than by clumsily stacking Lumetri effects), grading shadows/midtones/highlights separately as well as setting their ranges, and basic 2-up/3-up/snapshot functionality. I'm sure I can think of many more. Point is, as a color grading application the Lumetri Panel is a joke, a slightly better version of the plug-in effects that amateur colorists used to apply per-clip.

4. Jump ship. I've resisted this for a long time, as it would mean investing in new control surfaces, but Adobe's neglect has gotten to a breaking point. I'd resigned myself to the fact that Speedgrade would continue as a zombie application, never updated and slowly forgotten. Alas, even that was too much to ask.

[boomachine]

I have been a strong supporter of Adobe CC.

Despite a few small bugs here and there, I've felt that I had been getting my money's worth for great products.

Unfortunately these new updates have brought more headaches than any useful new features (had to submit bug reports for both Premiere and Audition). This is a very similar feeling to FCP7 > FCPX. The lack of transparency and clarity on the updates is a bit shocking.

Come on Adobe - we're your pros. Don't push us to your competitors.

[dianav49356783]

This is unbelievable! Why are you doing this? I cannot finish my projects and I am loosing time and money because of this stupid update. You do not respect your clients

[R Neil Haugen]

Kevin-Monahan​ is the one Adobe staffer in this thread ... he's an Experience Manager for PrPro/Sg, and the watching over the forums is his baby. He's a great guy, a LONG experienced editor who used to teach FinalCut to other editors & such before moving on into Adobe products.

As to voicing a complaint to be heard by both the PrPro managing team and the upper-level managers that ultimately make the major decisions on all of these programs, the ONLY way to be sure they've got at least a tabulated result of your issue with them is to file the bug/wish report form. ALL of those are tabulated and passed on to the top level of administrators for these programs, and they do not have the time to read through all the threads here.

They do not, as a practice, respond to the reports filed, which leaves us users feeling that it's ignored ... but as said, ALL bug/wish-feature request forms filed out are tabulated and the results delivered to all decision makers. They ARE important, and it seems ... you have something to say. PLEASE communicate this through the form, so they get the widest sample of user needs possible.

Neil

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi dianav,

This is unbelievable! Why are you doing this?

Perhaps you were directing this comment at me, and not your fellow user, Seneca_lives. Sorry, but I am on the support team and do not make product decisions. If you do wish to direct a comment at our product team, you can do so here. If you do not get a response, in general, the reasoning is behind our efforts in the Lumetri Color panel, which has been very popular.

I cannot finish my projects and I am loosing time and money because of this stupid update. You do not respect your clients

I do understand that frustration as I used to be an editor myself.

My advice as an editors is that I would recommend you remain in the previous version until you've cleared out all your projects. You can leave these versions installed if the Direct Link workflow is important to you.

Please let us know if I can assist you further.

Regards,
Kevin

[dianav49356783]

Kevin, thank you for your answer, but solutions which you offer do not work in my situation.

I have already left my comment to the product team, but they never answer, and I really need to get some feedback from Adobe.

Lumetri Color panel cannot be compared with SpeedGrade in functionality. It is not the solution.

You advise to remain in previous versions, but the situation is the following: I am not an editor, I am colour grader and I am getting projects from many different editirs and of course they use up-to-date software, which means that i cannot keep working in SpeedGrade. And this programme is the reason why I am paying for Adobe CC membership, because it used to be very useful and great.

And i really do not understand why Adobe could not let their clients know, yesterday I got a project for colour grading from one editor who has just updated his Premiere, this is final variant our one week work (we were working at the same time on editing and colour grading), and now I cannot open it in SpeedGrade to make final corrections. This would not happen if we knew beforehand that Adobe is going to kill Direct Link.

I am so much frustrated. I really cannot understand why a company would do this to its clients.

[Seneca_lives]

Hi, I'm in the same position as you, colorist telling all my clients to avoid upgrading Premiere and hoping they haven't already.

Have resigned myself to the fact that Direct Link won't be coming back (even if Adobe wanted to, they couldn't fix it anytime soon) and Speedgrade is effectively dead within a year or so as a platform for any new work.

Unfortunately, what you describe is the nightmare scenario I've been worrying about ever since this happened, and this is all I could come up with:

1. Export an EDL or FCP .xml from your latest, graded, 2015.2 version, and one from the final edit in 2015.3. Compare the differences in a text editor (one that highlights differences, preferably) and use this to bring the 2015.2 version up to date manually. This sounds like the worst job in editing ever, but it's probably the least bad option.

2. Export the project, grading and all, to a massive DPX image sequence and import that in Speedgrade and let it identify the cuts. You won't be able to adjust the current grading, but you can apply grading on top of it. You'll also have to finish in Speedgrade. You'll lose the timelines, shot labeling and it takes up terabytes of space.

3. Render and replace all your graded shots and export to Resolve. Again, you won't be able to adjust the current grading, but you can apply grading on top of it. You'll have to finish in Resolve. This option preserves the timelines and cuts and doesn't take up terabytes of disk space, but you'll have to work in a different grading app. There's also additional image fidelity loss due to recompression.

4. Try to make final adjustments in Lumetri only. (I think Lumetri actually processes its settings BEFORE any Speedgrade grading, so you'd have to start adjustments by adding an additional Lumetri effect.) I don't think this is realistic for any kind of "final touch", though.

Yes, these are four really horrible options and no professional should be in this situation. Adobe have effectively removed color grading from CC during an otherwise minor upgade and left it to its users to discover that AFTER they had irreversibly migrated files.

[dianav49356783]

Seneca, thank you very much for your help! 1st variant also seems to be the best choise for me. Still very sad that we have to do this extra work now.

[heynewt]

Seneca_lives wrote:

>>Hi, I'm in the same position as you, colorist telling all my clients to avoid upgrading Premiere and hoping they haven't already.<<

Yeah, that was my position as well, until... Client delivers a feature doc to me today that, for some inexplicable reason, was suddenly finished in 2015.3.  Going into a meeting tomorrow with producers where I have to tell them I can't open their project directly in Speedgrade anymore, like I have been doing with their other shows for the last few years.

Their response, I can assure you, is going to be something along the lines of WTF.  They want to be able to round-trip the project of course, preserving the sequence.  They don't want to export and import an EDL.  The whole thing is really a punch in the gut to those of us who use these products professionally on a daily basis.  Very similar to Apple suddenly abandoning FCP as a professional editing platform.

Just stunned, really.

Robert

[KevinAGI]

I have some solutions, but don't know if adobe wants me to publish here . Kevin M. please chime in if I should take this topic elsewhere.

I have been able to get my 2015.3 project into and out of Speedgrade.

Kevin

[heynewt]

Man, I hope you publish here, or tell us where you are going to publish.  Could save a huge gig for me.

Robert

[KevinAGI]

Ok I'm doing this from my iPhone at home so forgive the craziness and lack of specifics. I dI'd this on a Mac so these will be Mac specific, but you can adapt.

First take your premiere project and change the extension to .gz

Then unzip the project. It will not have an extension.

Open the project in your favorite text editor as a plain text document. I used textMate.

The around the 3rd or 4th, sorry I'm on my iPhone at home look for a version in quotes "31".

Change the 31 to 30 and save.

Rename the file to have the extension .prproj.

Open in speedgrade.

Grade and save. You can now open back up in premiere.

I can't say this will work with everything I literally checked it on a trailer I am working on.

Kevin

[R Neil Haugen]

Interesting ... this is a last-ditch thing to do, but ... if you work a copy of your project files, it should be ok.

I just did this within Win7, on a quick test project I made up with 4-5 clips. I added a few cross-dissolves, some Lumetri color work on a clip or two, then went to the project file, right-clicked, selecting the "7-zip, extract to ... " opening that folder.

Right-clicked the circled file ... "Open" option, which brought up the various text-options on my machine, just took Notepad, and got this ...

Changed that "31" to "30" and then saved, changed the file extension back to .prproj, and then opened that file in SpeedGrade 2015. All came through, cross-dissolves, the Lumetri panel work, all the very few things I'd done.

Proceeded to grade this within SpeedGrade, then saved it.

Opened that file from PrPro 2015.3, it noted the file was from a previous version, and created a new copy. That file when it opened had all previous work done within PrPro & Sg.

So ... this may work as a hack-around, use at your own discretion. ONLY with save-as project files to begin with, of course. Noting they are modified!

Neil

[Seneca_lives]

Can also confirm it works to get 2015.3 files into both Speedgrade or directly into Premiere 2015.2....!

(Note that if you first extract the nameless file and then edit it - instead of opening the file from within 7-Zip - you'll have to re-zip it to a .gz compressed file again after changing the version number. I got this wrong on my first try.)

Wouldn't entrust my workflow to this, but it seems pretty robust so far. Going to play around some more tomorrow... graded feature with lots of AE and various formats, see how it holds up. One hopeful sign is that some tags that appear to be related to new 2015.3 features always get added to the XML, even in an empty project, but older versions apparently just ignore these.

Thanks KevinAGI... amazed that this actually works, but not complaining!

[psion99]

Aww, tried this on a mac, and it didn't work.  😕

Very cool that we can edit the project file this way though.

[R Neil Haugen]

There's a thread started by a Mac user on hacking the project file, doing exactly the same thing, but manually. Takes about 3-4 minutes the first couple times, about a minute after you know what you're doing. Again, just changing that one (1) character, then changing it back.

So ... here's the link to the discussion of that ...

PrPro/Sg 2015.3 Workaround Hack

Neil

[heynewt]

Oh man, that's brilliant.  Didn't know Prem projects had editable text properties.  First I've ever heard of this.  Seriously, you probably just saved me 4 days of work trying to conform the 2015.2 project the producers stopped using last week to the 2015.3 final project they delivered today. 

Thank you!

Remember, everyone, make a COPY of your project file before hacking.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Kevin AGI,

I have some solutions, but don't know if adobe wants me to publish here . Kevin M. please chime in if I should take this topic elsewhere. I have been able to get my 2015.3 project into and out of Speedgrade.

I think this would be classified as a workaround. I see no problem with it if it helps. On behalf of the users, thank you so much.

Cheers,
Kevin

[Kevin-Monahan]

I think this would be classified as a workaround. I see no problem with it if it helps.

I just checked. I can't officially recommend or support this workaround. If you have trouble with it, I can't help you. Sorry.

Please feel free to file a bug report or feature request for restoring Direct Link to the product if you have not already done so.

Thanks,
Kevin

[jsulley]

All:

To allow for further discussion of alternative workflows, specifically Resolve, I have created a Facebook group, Adobe - Resolve Grading Workflows. I hope you will all join so that we can continue sharing ideas which may include options not exactly fitting to an Adobe forum. This upgrade has forced me to really look at Resolve and I am liking it a lot.

Jim

[zanad79121666]

1) how Adobe can make a thing without give any information about the end of this function few months before.

many professionals had chosen yours softwares because you offer a global solution (premiere, speedgrade, AE)

you decide with one vision without thinking about the impact of our business.

2) You are not Apple of course, and we choose Adobe because you have the sustainability of the solution.

but with the end of Encore, it was the first alert ! 

Now you do the same thing with Speedgrade.

you don't stop Speedgrade ?! but all projets of the new version of premiere are not compatible with speedgrade (the solution EDL don't work too)

3) Why  are we choosing Speedgrade ? It is easier than the other solution: there is a relationship with AE, Premiere. And of course you can applied a sort of color from a sequence to other sequence, and with premiere it is not possible ! Premiere is for cutting, AE is for FX keep Speedgrade for color !

4) i'm sure that you will give us many statistic of this functionally is not used, i don't care.

We are professional, we make business ! we have a lot of thing to think than manage you because a guy in your marketing dpt had a stupid idea.  I have not enough time to pray each time adobe will put a new update !

we need  the sustainability of a solution. if you are not able to understand that , you are not able to work with business.

you should remember that we pay 840€/year to have a solution, not for having a company which change in each update the rules (without prevent users a lot of months before).

5) is there someone in Adobe could explain why this functionality has a wrong impact on our business, or on the software, and why adobe remove it (the functionality was there, it worked ! with the same idea, you should remove the link with AE)

6) now i have many projet that i cannot used with speedgrade, many projet that of course i could not opened with a older version of premiere (V 9.2 for example) !

what will i say to my customer ? "sorry, i lost your project, i am on a dead end now with the new version of Adobe creative "

forget the comment as "by design" or "we could give you bypass way !"

Put back this feature and let us work on it !

[R Neil Haugen]

As another user, please do file the bug/request form ... as nice as Kevin is being here, he's just the person on the PrPro team assigned to oversee the user-to-user forums for PrPro & Sg. NOT any kind of management person. The Adobe structure seems to separate these forums as user-to-user 'benefits' and the management decision staff as totally separate entities. So ... to get your opinion to those who make the decisions, you MUST file the bug/feature-request form.

Although Adobe does not respond to reports filed, they ARE tabulated and delivered to all the management people who actually make the decisions as to how the programs work ... which are above the levels (as far as I've been able to determine) of the team members themselves. And I have seen numerous changes come about from enough reports filed on an issue ...

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Neil,

as nice as Kevin is being here, he's just the person on the PrPro team assigned to oversee the user-to-user forums for PrPro & Sg. NOT any kind of management person.

Actually, I am the Support Product Manager. I am in management. I'm just not in Premiere Pro management. As odd as that sounds, I'm in the support organization, which is different than the product team's organization. This "separation of powers" is actually good. I can be more objective and advocate for users more easily because it's set up this way.

I also do more than oversee the forums, as well. I'm focused on support strategy. You are correct in that I play no part in product decisions.

Thanks,
Kevin

[R Neil Haugen]

Yes ... keeping the proper understanding of the various roles is rather necessary with large-ish companies!

But ... you do what you do rather well, so ... thank you!

Neil

[heynewt]

Hi Kevin,

I second that, and I understand and appreciate your advocacy.  Of course it's true that more people use Lumetri within Premiere than use Speedgrade.  But that's an unfair comparison, imho.  SpeedGrade is a specialty product so of course it's user base is going to be smaller than a general editing software like Premiere.  There are far fewer colorists or than there are general editors.

For me personally, this is about being able to turn a profit or not.  I compete with other colorists using Resolve, or Avid Symphony, for colorist jobs.  They don't call it SpeedGrade for nothing.  I'm 3X faster in SpeedGrade than I am with Lumetri in Premiere.  Plus I'm doing a bunch of multi-camera shows right now, so the ability to CC Master Clips is invaluable.  That doesn't exist (yet) inside Premiere.  I just can't compete using Premiere alone.

If Adobe's plan is to make Premiere/Lumetri as comprehensive as, say, Avid Symphony's CC interface, then I'm behind you 100%.  But if Adobe's attitude is, well, Lumetri as it exists within Premiere is "good enough", even though it's nowhere near as powerful as SpeedGrade, then that makes me sad.

I have filled out the feature request, and explained all this in that request.

Robert

[R Neil Haugen]

Robert,

SO understand your very professional dilemma. While Resolve is feature-laden, and I've done some with it, it's ... a bear to learn, and one MUST do XML/EDL conform/relink and all that time-consuming technical process to get stuff ready to START working. Not particularly time-efficient, especially for smaller jobs and smaller shops.

Besides ... what it does, Sg does *fast*.

Between the speed for me of working within Sg, and up to now, the speed of taking my own projects to Sg to grade, back to PrPro in seconds ... this has been a jolt to lose that.

I'm working with both a Ripple and a full Elements panel in 2015.3 Lumetri, and they do help. Some.

But only being able to make one secondary is very limiting. Unless you make a second "instance" of Lumetri, at which point the first instance is only controllable through mouse use as the surfaces only work with the last Lumetri applied to a clip ... well, I didn't use multiple secondaries in every clip but an awful lot of them!

No shot-matching, no two/three-up, and even worse ... the intentional design limitation of how far you can push your media up or down. I keep spinning a wheel or dial only to realize it's stopped having any effect because I've gone as far as PrPro will ALLOW me to go. That's ... frustrating.

I really have been spending a LOT of time with surfaces and Lumetri ... so I'll have some things to add to the discussion 'over there' about how to do things within the current ... rules. And *if* one understands it, one can do things that at first glance don't seem possible.

But ... at least in this version ... it is far more limiting and nowhere near as fast to use. Now ..  the full Elements panel in Sg ... "Heaven ... I'm in Heaven ... " croons the old song ...

Neil