About Comparison View

The Comparison View of the Monitor has been moved from Edit mode to Color mode and updated to support the expanded color adjustment workflows now available. Comparison View makes it easy to compare two clips when you need to adjust their colors and contrast to match each other, working through a scene or program to make each clip match a particular frame you’ve chosen as the reference image.

The split-screen also applies to the HUDs available for each of the color controls, which makes it easy to make adjustments to use contrast and exposure to match the highlights and shadows of clips with different contrast ratios using the tops and bottoms of the waveform monitor, as well as aligning the vector scope graphs of one clip to match the overall color temperature of other clips you’re trying to match to using Temperature or Balance.

There are three workflows currently available when using Comparison View:

• Comparing a graded clip to the ungraded original version of itself.
• Comparing two clips that have been selected in the Clip Grid.
• Comparing a clip in the clip grid to a frame marked with a color reference marker.

Each of these workflows will be explored in the following sections, along with different ways of customizing the comparison you’re making using controls that appear when you hover the pointer over the monitor.

Comparing a graded clip to the ungraded original

If you want to see how a clip you’ve graded compares to the ungraded original version of itself, this is easy to do.

By default, the graded version of the clip appears to the right, and the ungraded original version appears to the left (hovering the pointer over the Monitor shows labels identifying which is which, along with other controls for customizing the split).

There are any number of reasons you might want to make this kind of comparison, but it’s particularly valuable when you want to confirm with either yourself or your client that the adjustment you made is truly an improvement over the original, or when you want to verify whether or not an artifact in the image is the result of an adjustment you’ve made, or is actually present in the original image.

When you’re finished comparing clips, select the Comparison View button underneath the monitor to turn it off.

Comparing clips using Clip Grid selections

The fastest way to compare two clips is:

By default, the current clip that you can adjust appears to the right of the split, and the first of any secondary selections you’ve made appears as the reference clip to the left of the split. Hovering the pointer over the Monitor shows labels identifying which is which along with other controls for customizing the split.

If you’ve selected multiple clips as secondary selections, all of these appear to the left of the Monitor in the Reference List, which lets you choose which of the secondary selections you want to use for comparing against the current clip.

This makes it easy to quickly switch among multiple clips for rapid comparison, but it also makes it incredibly fast and easy to make color adjustments to match multiple clips in a scene. For example, if you turn on Comparison View and then select every clip belonging to a particular scene in the Clip Grid, this makes it incredibly easy to choose which clip in the scene you want to use as your reference in the reference list, and then click each selected clip in the Clip Grid that you want to adjust to match the reference.

Clicking any secondary selection to make it the current clip (or using the go to Next/Previous Edit Point commands within the range of secondary selections) doesn’t deselect anything, which makes it fast to go from clip to clip within the selected range and make adjustments while you’re comparing to any selected clip in the reference list.

When you’re done, select the Comparison View button underneath the monitor to turn it off, and deselect the secondary selections.

Comparing clips using Color Reference Markers

If there are specific clips throughout your sequence that you want to use for reference, you can add Color Reference Markers to frames you want to use for comparison. You can add Color Reference Markers either to the sequence or to clips.

Once added, you can use the Markers panel to show them in a list, and you can pin specific Color Reference Markers to the Comparison View reference list for ongoing comparison. This is a good workflow if there are images in a longer sequence that you know you want to use as reference images for matching other scenes in that sequence.

Placing Color Reference Markers

Color Reference is a new marker type added to Premiere that defaults to blue. This new marker type appears in the Options section of the Edit Marker panel when you edit a marker. These are just like other markers, with the sole distinction that they’re typed such that you can filter them separately from other markers in the marker panel if you want to isolate them for fast access.

While any marker can be created and turned into a Color Reference marker, there is a dedicated Marker > Add Color Reference Marker command, separate from Add Marker (Control or Command + M). This command doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut by default, but you can map one of your choosing if you like.

There’s also an Add Color Reference Marker button in the default button bar of the Color Monitor, between the Previous and Next Marker buttons.

This enables you to quickly add a color reference marker to frames you want to compare later, while still creating ordinary markers for notes and other purposes. The reason for providing a separate type is that while you may have dozens or even hundreds of ordinary markers, you may only have a small subset of markers that represent frames you want to use for comparison, so this makes it easy to filter the Markers panel in order to avoid having to scroll through every single marker in your sequence to find the specific image you want to compare to.

Viewing all Color Reference Markers in a Sequence

Once you’ve started adding Color Reference Markers, you can see them in the Markers panel to use with Comparison View. To set up the Markers panel to see all Color Reference Markers in a sequence, do the following:

With these settings, the Markers panel shows all Color Reference Markers in the current sequence for easy reference. Be aware that you can only see one sequence’s markers at a time, and only from the current sequence in focus.

Additionally, the thumbnails of sequence and clip markers show different states of the clip. Sequence marker thumbnails show the sequence clip image, which includes effects and the color grade. Clip marker thumbnails show the source clip image, which doesn’t include effects and the color grade. Regardless of which thumbnail is shown, all Color Reference Markers will allow you to make comparisons.

Using Color Reference Markers for comparison

Once you’ve exposed your Color Reference Marker in the Markers panel, you can right-click on any marker in the Markers panel list and choose Pin as Comparison to “pin” that marker to the top of the reference list in Comparison View, which automatically turns on (if necessary) to show you the current comparison being made. Once a pinned item in the reference list is selected, you can compare any other clip in the Clip Grid to the pinned marker without making any other selections, and pinned markers stay pinned in the reference list until you remove them.

In fact, you can also combine pinned markers with selections from the Clip Grid in the reference list. Pinned markers appear at the top, while secondary selections in the Clip Grid appear at the bottom. You can select any thumbnail in the list to choose it as the comparison image.

Removing thumbnails from the Reference List

Since pinned markers stay pinned, even when you close and re-open Comparison View, there are ways of removing them from the reference list when you no longer need them:

• To remove any thumbnail from the reference list, right-click it and choose Remove from Comparison.
• To remove all pinned markers from the reference list, right-click any pinned marker and choose Clear Pinned Reference.

To remove secondary selections from the reference list, you need to deselect the corresponding clip in the Clip Grid.

Customizing the Clip Comparison View

There are several ways to customize the split-screen in Comparison View. Some controls appear when you hover the pointer over the Monitor, which you can use to swap the left and right images and change the center point of the split screen.

• The swap button, at the center of the screen by default, lets you reverse the two sides of the split screen in case that gives you a better comparison.
• You can hover over and drag the split edge to adjust where the split-screen edge appears, making it easier to compare two areas of each image.
• Double-clicking the split edge resets it to the halfway point.

Other controls appear in the button bar below the monitor.

• Two buttons let you switch between a horizontal and a vertical split-screen for comparison.

Changing the Comparison Frame of items in the Reference List

Once you’ve populated the reference list of Comparison View with one or more pinned markers or secondary selections in the Clip Grid, you also have the option of changing which frame of each thumbnail is used for comparison. By default, you can see a playhead and marker over each thumbnail. These show you the position of the reference marker, but the playhead lets you reposition the frame you’re viewing for reference.

• To change which frame you’re referencing, drag the playhead of the thumbnail in the reference list back and forth to another frame.
• To see the original reference frame, right-click on the thumbnail in the reference list and choose Reset to Original Reference.