Working with Adobe SpeedGrade

Enhanced in Premiere Pro CC

Adobe® SpeedGrade® is a color grading application that brings advanced color-grading capabilities to your footage.

You can roundtrip your video sequences from Premiere Pro to Speedgrade for color grading, and back to Premiere Pro. You can export Premiere Pro sequences to SpeedGrade either as DPX still image sequences or edit decision lists (EDLs). After completing color grading in SpeedGrade, those projects can be exported as stand-alone video files back into Premiere Pro for more editing.

Watch this video to see the roundtrip workflow between Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC includes the Lumetri™ Deep Color Engine that lets you apply .look files from SpeedGrade to your clips.

The Lumetri Looks browser in the Effects panel provides you a library of preset Lumetri looks. You can apply SpeedGrade color-correction layers and pre-made Lookup Tables (LUT) to your sequences without leaving the application. The Looks Browser also helps you locate and use exported .look files from SpeedGrade or LUTs from other systems.

To send a sequence to SpeedGrade, select File > Send to Adobe SpeedGrade.

For more information on the editing and grading workflow between SpeedGrade and Premiere Pro, see this article.

• Send to SpeedGrade exports a SpeedGrade project file (.ircp) and a series of DPX sequences in folders, representing segments in the Premiere sequence, with no "handles".
• For cuts-only edits, each clip is sent as a separate DPX sequence.
• For clips with transitions, the portion of the clip without the transition is sent as a DPX sequence, and the portion with the transition is sent as a separate DPX sequence.
• Similarly, composited segments are flattened and sent as separate DPX segments. Individual clips can also be selected in the Project panel and sent to SpeedGrade, where they are converted into a single DPX segment.
• Each DPX segment is packaged into a separate folder, labeled with the sequence timecode of the first frame of that segment, along with the clip name. This makes it easier to locate specific shots within the Premiere sequence, as they can be sorted to match the order they appear in the sequence. In addition to the Media folder and the .ircp project file, a .wav file is exported of the entire sequences audio for a reference soundtrack. For individual clips, the media source timecode is used.
• When the SpeedGrade .ircp project file is opened in SpeedGrade, SpeedGrade opens the sequence (or the individual clip) in its timeline, ready for grading.

Instead of sending a sequence to SpeedGrade and creating additional DPX files, you can link to your original sequence via exporting an EDL from Premiere Pro, and then importing it into SpeedGrade. To do so, follow these steps:

1. In Premiere Pro, select the sequence in the Project panel or the Timeline.
2. Choose File > Export > EDL
3. Make adjustments to the EDL, choose a name, and destination, and then click OK. A CMX 3600 style EDL is created.
4. In SpeedGrade, refresh the desktop, and then navigate to the EDL.
5. Click the EDL. The edits are loaded into SpeedGrade.
6. In the Reels section, you see the offline clips.
7. In the sidebar, locate the original files.
8. Choose > Sequences from folder and sub-tree from the Sequence Folder View menu. The material from the media folder appears.
9. In the Reels section, click the Load from Desktop button. SpeedGrade conforms the material based on the information from the EDL.