Adobe Acquires Iridas

[David Parks]

IRIDAS - The Art of Moving Pictures.

This is a interesting move. Adobe now can offer an industrial strength grading app.

[Chris Hurd]

Thanks, David -- here is the press release:

Adobe Acquires IRIDAS Technology at DVInfo.net

[Bart Walczak]

Yes! Finally!

Wonderful news, we'll see what comes out of that though :)

[Andrew Smith]

I guess we'll all have to upgrade to CS6 when it comes time?

Andrew

[Steve Kalle]

Hmmmm. Maybe this purchase explains why BMD is releasing Resolve on Windows.

This is exciting news IF it develops into a grading program which is bundled with Adobe's Production Suite like Color in FCS AND works via Dynamic Link with Premiere and AE. Imagine not having to worry about XMLs and EDLs when you want to finish or grade a project being edited in Premiere Pro. Currently, you must edit, export an EDL, import EDL in Resolve (or other grading program), then render out and import back into Premiere. How about this: edit in PPro, open Adobe's Speedgrade, grade/finish and see your results immediately in PPro via Dynamic Link (just like I already do with AE comps imported into PPro).

ANYONE sitting on the fence who is considering a switch from FCP to Premiere Pro should see this as a sign that Adobe is making the right decisions and they are seriously committed to Video Professionals. I can't wait to see what CS6 entails.

[Bart Walczak]

Ideally what I'd like to see is not a dynamic link, since it can really clog the processing, when there are more linked files (I've tried to export one with 400 AE stabilized comps via AME and gave up when it was still trying to process the project file after 45 minutes, didn't even start encoding), but a color-grading layer(s) tightly integrated with Premiere and/or AE. Dynamic Link messes up my ability to edit the stuff afterwards, since it does not allow for handles (now, that would be a feature request, right?).

Ideally I would have Premiere act like Smoke - just switch to color correction room and you can work with the edit that you already have in the program. I'm not sure that it will be coming soon though. I guess they will create the XML workflow for CS6, and make sure that SpeedGrade accepts all formats that other applications do. There is very little time for them to incorporate any revolutionary changes right now. Perhaps they will try to unify the interface more. We'll see.

I've browsed the user manual for SpeedGrade, and I think I might still try to go to Resolve for more complex jobs due to their superior tracking and transform controls. But I'm very happy that Adobe will finally have a dedicated grading application. CCing in Premiere was very time consuming.

[Steve Kalle]

Hi Bart,

I like your ideas, especially making Premiere more like Smoke (come on Autodesk and release Smoke for Windows and include Batch).

I would think with the limited time, Adobe will release something like the Color Finesse plug-in for Premiere.

400 shots in AE!? You were asking for trouble :) Did you end up rendering all shots from AE and replacing in Premiere?

[Bart Walczak]

I had very nasty footage that needed stabilization, and needed it badly. It wouldn't have happened if Premiere had stabilization plugin built in, but alas, I had to resort to Dynamic Link.

I ended up exporting directly from Premiere, this worked without a glitch, it was just AME that had problems opening the project and digesting it.

Here's the webpage where you can have your say about how you'd like Speedgrade to be incorporated in the package:

What the Adobe acquisition of IRIDAS technology means for our professional video applications Premiere Pro work area

[Bart Walczak]

I realize this is old news by now, but here are a few more of my thoughts on the matter:

After acquiring the IRIDAS Adobe is in a perfect position now to replace the now EOLed Final Cut Studio as a preferred suite of applications for editing and now relatively low cost finishing. This is also what is most likely to happen, even though personally I would love Premiere Pro, After Effects, Lightroom, Photoshop, Audition and now SpeedGrade to be integrated in one single seamless application a la Smoke. I am obviously not the only person to think about that (see comments here), nor even the first one by any stretch of imagination.

Here is however why I don‘t think it will happen though. For one, recent changes in pricing and the fact that Adobe software has became very affordable for new businesses and startups is something that the company is not going to strike out by building a single finishing application encompassing the functionality of the whole suite. Arguably the fact that you can essentially rent a single specific tool for your job for next to nothing is one of the things that makes Adobe software more popular than ever. This business model would be seriously undermined by conversion of the suite to a single application, and this is what actually none of us think would be a wise thing to do.

Secondly, the architectures of After Effects and Premiere Pro – not even mentioning Audition – seem to be quite different. Even though Adobe has gone to great lengths to ensure proper translation of projects between the applications, there is a realm of difference between this and actually merging the two together in a Smoke-like manner. Don’t get fooled by the similarities of the interface. The engines running these two are quite different, and to actually enclose one in another might be impossible without rewriting most of the code. Adobe already did that while creating 64-bit applications, and there is hardly any incentive to do that again, especially since their time for development has actually shortened due to the “dot half” releases.

The only sensible way to approach this is to create a new application from scratch, but that would be essentially duplicating the features of already existing programs without any real benefit to the business, and at at least twice the cost. This is not something that is going to happen without a serious incentive to do so. Perhaps incorporation of SpeedGrade into the suite might be such a good pretext, but it all depends on the underlying architecture of the program itself, and is not going to happen soon, so don’t hold your breath until CS7 or even CS8.

I bet that in the short term we will see the remake of SpeedGrade’s interface to suit more the CS family, perhaps a few more options will be added, and a “Send to…” workflow will be established between Premiere, After Effects and SpeedGrade, perhaps with the addition of plugin a la recent Baselight development for the old FCP. This is what is feasible to expect in CS6. SpeedGrade will be able to see and render all Premiere and After Effects effects, transitions etc., due to the incorporation of either Dynamic Link or the standalone renderers that already are present in Adobe Media Encoder, and hopefully will be able to merge projects from Audition as well.

Perhaps a new common project file format will be born, independent of any application, akin to the container, where each application reads and works only on its own parts, and it all comes together in SpeedGrade (finishing), Bridge (playback) or even AME for export. And if nobody at Adobe is working on such an idea yet, then please start immediately, because this is exactly what is needed in the big shared workflows. This format would get rid of the some of the really annoying problems of the Dynamic Link, and would open a lot of possibilities.

In the long run we might see a birth of a new Ubertool – a true finishing app from Adobe, and if a container-project idea is embraced, the workflow might even be two-way. I would imagine that this tool would also incorporate some management ideas from recently demonstrated Foundry Hiero, like versioning, conforming, or even preparing material to send to Premiere Pro, AE, Audition, etc. for other artists. Because Adobe Suite does not need only the Color Grading software for completion. It needs a true project management and finishing application, and that would be an excellent logical step for Adobe to take, and then their workflow would really encompass all stages of pre-, post- and production proper. Which I hope will happen in the end.

One thing that I am sure Adobe will not do: they will not repeat the debacle of FCPX. The new Ubertool might be able to do all that other apps do, and probably more, perhaps even better, but they will not fade the smaller tools out of existence immediately, if ever, and everyone will be able to talk to each other as seamlessly as possible.

(Original article here: https://lifecaveats.wordpress.com/20...liver-and-why/)

[Konstantin Kovalev]

In the long run we might see a birth of a new Ubertool – a true finishing app from Adobe

I'd like a Photoshop equivalent for video. I know that you can technically already use it for that purpose, but it's extremely slow and cumbersome, though if it could be reworked to allow you to go from importing footage all the way to exporting a finished product, It'll pretty much end all competition then and there.

Having all of Photoshop's tools key-able and available in a real-time, non-destructive environment where you can do all the editing, compositing, grading and export in one package is pretty much my holy grail.

Whatever the outcome, I really like SpeedGrade NX, so I'd like to see where Adobe takes it.