New features summary

The December 2014 release of SpeedGrade CC includes several changes and bug fixes. For more details, see Adobe SpeedGrade CC (2014.2) Update

What's new and changed | October 2014

The 2014.1 release of Adobe SpeedGrade CC provides creative tools like Curve adjustments, Grading Layer Grouping, hover previews for Looks, and several other enhancements.

Read on for a quick introduction to the new features and links to resources offering more information.

Enhanced UI

Like other Creative Cloud video applications, this new release offers a refined new user interface with support for HiDPI displays, including Windows 8.1 systems.

The color scheme is more subtle and UI elements have been simplified. For example, the Effects menu has been organized to enable easy search. To view it, click the “+” icon at the bottom of the Grading Layer panel.

Effects pop-up menu is now organized into relevant groups as follows:

• Blur and Sharpen
• Color Match
• Curves
• Film
• Misc
• Stylize
• Video

Curve adjustments

Under Curves, there are two new color tool options:

• RGB Curves
• Hue & Saturation Curves

You can use curve adjustments on their own, or combine them with any other grading layers, Looks, or LUTs.

For more information, see Color Adjustments.

Grouping Grading Layers

With the 2014.1 release, you can now collect parts of your grade (or Look) and group them together. This grouping helps to create organized complex Looks. In addition, you can adjust the opacity of a group of grades in just one step. With this enhancement, it is easy to combine multiple Looks and effects, and create a Look remix. For more information, see Grading layer grouping.

Support for Blackmagic cards

This feature is new in this release. SpeedGrade provides support for Blackmagic cards.

User Interface enhancements

Hover to preview Looks

If you hover over a Look thumbnail, you can view how that Look impacts your image in the monitor. This feature makes it easy to test and compare Looks. For more information, see Share and Reuse Looks.

Enhanced vertical sliders for luminance control

SpeedGrade provides a bigger vertical slider in addition to the existing circular luminance dial on the Look panel. This change allows in editing and viewing the color scheme changes with much more ease. You can control luminance values in the image's shadow, midtone, and highlight regions using either the dial on the color wheels or the vertical slider.

Also, the other color control options are now muted in the grading panel except for the active color control option being used. However, when you click any of the color control option, the option appears bright and you can perform the desired action.

Improved Direct Link

Improved Direct Link integration between Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade makes color grading easier and more flexible than before.

For more information on using Direct Link, see Direct Link workflow between Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade.

Other changes

New SpeedLooks

In this release, new SpeedLooks have been added to the SpeedLooks package to provide you more out-of-the-box creative Looks.

SpeedGrade sports four new SpeedLooks, giving you even more options for sophisticated color grading presets that perform well across different types of footage and lighting conditions. You can group this look with grading layers to instantly create new custom looks.

 SpeedLooks are available under their own tabs in the Look Manager.

Audio Support for Premiere Pro projects

Audio support is available for Premiere Pro projects in SpeedGrade. This feature allows you to hear the sound with the color. This new feature helps because soundtracks or dialog often provide cues for transitions in lighting.

Performance with masks

Performance with masks is now also improved, making it easier to work with masks in general, and multiple masks in particular. Related to this enhancement, SpeedGrade’s tracking is now faster.

Improved Autosave

SpeedGrade also offers improved Autosave, both in Direct Link and in native SpeedGrade mode. This option is available in References  > AutoSave to automatically save the files. The default number of saved project files is 20.

Enhanced Mercury Transmit to support output to 4K monitors

SpeedGrade has enhanced Mercury Transmit to support output to 4K monitors.

Shared memory pool with other DVA apps

SpeedGrade shares a memory pool with other DVA apps.  

A memory balancer prevents swapping of RAM to disk by dynamically managing the memory allocated to each of the applications. Each application registers with the memory balancer with some basic information. The information constitutes of minimum memory requirements, maximum memory able to be used, current memory in use, and a priority. The priority has three settings: low, normal, and highest.