Adobe Premiere Pro CC: Reader Interface Suggestions [u]

[Updated Jan. 23, 2018, with comments from Adobe.]

In January, 2018, I asked my newsletter subscribers to suggest interface improvements for Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Apple Final Cut Pro X. 53 readers submitted more than 200 suggestions.

Here are their responses for Premiere Pro CC, listed in no particular order. Comments came in from around the world. Almost everyone expressed their love for the software, but…

I found all their comments fascinating and look forward to sharing them with you.

Larry

P.S. I also passed a copy of this to the Premiere development team at Adobe. Software takes a long time to develop and test. Still, let us hope that some of these can be implemented for the next version.

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SUGGESTIONS

Mike Janowski

1. Fix labels, so that instances already in the timeline reflect the change.
2. Make the indicator when grabbing and moving clips BIG and BRIGHT enough to read
3. Allow a multiple selection of clips to show keyframes…right now, you have to do ’em one at a time.
4. Make all the boundaries in the track selection panel more contrasty, so I can see where they are.
5. In fact, let’s get some COLOR and LIGHTNESS into the interface. When they first went to this scheme several releases ago, I termed it “GULAG”…unrelenting shades of grey. DEPRESSING!
6. This gets close to a new feature, but if FCP 7 could rename a file from within the bin/interface, Premiere should as well. Why, on god’s green earth, would I want to re-name a file? Many perfectly good reasons, which are far too numerous to mention here.
7. “Minimize/maximize” timeline (backslash) should ALSO WORK to minimize/maximize the source viewer. Right now, even if I have the source viewer selected and press the backslash (or Shift-Z, as a holdover from fcp), the timeline changes views…stupid.

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Patricia Stackpole

Recently I used the new Audio Essentials tools to sweeten some interviews. I recorded the audio separately from the video synced them together and linked them. They synced perfectly and I used the new Audio Essentials to sharpen the voices. It looks perfect on the interface, but when I exported them using “match sequence” settings and also the Youtube 1080 export settings the voices shifted by a significant amount and the rendered project was out of sync on the voices I used the effect on.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, has Adobe fixed the problem? I had to shift each voice out of sync inside the project to get it to match on the export. YIKES! This has NEVER happened in the past and I’ve used Premiere since 2011.

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Dan Montenegro

The interface works fine for me, I only want better keyboard shortcuts. FCP and Resolve have such amazing shortcuts, that my workflow just suffers in Premiere Pro, which is my main editing program.

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John Haptas

In Effect Controls window, in the right hand portion showing keyframes, only the range of the clip can be viewed. The view cannot be extended to include portions before and after the current range of the clip. It is easier to see what is going on with a wider view, and, more importantly, it is often useful to put keyframes before or after the current range of the clip (assuming the media extends beyond that) to effect the behavior of the parameter being addressed.

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Alan Bernstein

Not sure if this counts as an interface change or new feature – BUT: when I open my current project, I get an alert saying that I have an obsolete audio effect (EQ) being used somewhere. It is a huge project with many, many clips.

I would like the ability to:

• Easily find all instances where a particular effect is being used
• Easily remove all instances where a particular effect is being used without having to check each individual clip.

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David Richmond

• I would like to have the Mettle VR windows not come up on launch. It freezes quite a bit and is bothersome.
• I would like to see a previous, current, next scene in the Color interface instead of having to use the reference monitor to compare.
• I would like to have a “create proxy” option for importing files using Media Browser.

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Patrick Norman

Here are a few suggestions for how Adobe can improve the interface of Premiere:

• Clips in the timeline should appear more like they did in FCP 7. In Premiere, the clips correspond to their layer color but are one color only; i.e., they look flat, whereas in FCP 7 clips had a 1-pixel highlight on the left and top sides of the clip and corresponding dark lines on the right and bottom, as well as a black outline, which gave the impression of depth. I can’t begin to describe how visually satisfying this is, and while it may seem to be a minor aesthetic preference, it makes an enormous difference. It makes me feel like I’m actually manipulating something physically instead of just sliding colored boxes around. See below:

Honestly, just opening the dinosaur FCP 7 to take that screenshot & seeing that old interface made me feel so much more satisfied and relaxed than Premiere does, and I love Premiere! The difference is that substantial.

• Sequence headers in the timeline panel should be able to be color-coded. Not just the underlined sequence name, but a rectangle behind it. Again, FCP 7 had this feature (looked like colored tabs when multiple sequences were open) and it was very, very useful for moving around at-a-glance, especially with multiple sequences open at once.

I know it sounds like I’m just saying they should copy FCP 7 — because I am — but there are reasons why it was so popular and attention to the small details was one of them. Adobe should use what works! Color is good, contrast is good, depth is good. Flat may be the trendy aesthetic but it’s not necessarily the most useful visually.

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Allyn Wilkinson

I think the Effects tab is getting really cluttered and hard to navigate especially now that everything for text is in there too. I’d really love to see Premiere adopt a Effects Rack like Audition has. It’s nice and neat. It’s easy to rearrange effects and turn them off and on. But most of all, each effect opens in its own window and you can have multiple windows open and preview and edit the parameters live.

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Bob O’Brien

For those who have a speedy enough computer, I would like a higher quality monitoring option for multicam editing.

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Don Hertz

1. In the project window, in List view, be able to click on the color assigned to the clip and get a drop down of the available colors for selecting a different one. The current method of right-clicking on a clip, going to Label, then selecting the color from that list is unnecessarily cumbersome when your logging a significant amount of footage.
2. Color grading – be able to easily drag a “split screen view” bar/indicator in the program monitor so I can quickly see a side-by-side of the before and after of a correction.
3. Color grading – (Not sure if this qualifies as feature or interface) – Need a button that opens up an additional reference monitor which always displays the prior clip or as I grade. That way I can always see the prior shot I’m trying to match to when grading the current shot but also can keep my scopes up in the current reference monitor while opening another one for the prior clip. (This was one of Speedgrade’s best tools – bring it to Premiere!)
4. Make key framing more like After Effects.

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UPDATE: Jan. 23, 2018

Larry adds: Adobe’s development team sent me two emails after getting this report. The first thanked everyone for their suggestions. They are talking about them internally.

The second from the Premiere product manager said: “Not only thank you, but some of the improvements suggested by your readers are currently considered for the next upcoming release of Premiere Pro.”  So, yay, us!

Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

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