It isn’t often that Adobe releases a meaningful update to their cloud products. Most often, the new features they push to their subscribers are really just gimmicks they use to justify the monthly ding to your credit cards – or, at least, that’s my opinion.
A lot of the features offered inside of Premiere Pro are bloat. They aren’t making the software any faster, more stable, or user friendly just adding more and more capabilities that (for me) rarely get used in day-to-day post work. However, the Scene Edit Detection feature in the latest update to Premiere Pro isn’t just one of the best functions they’ve added to the software in years, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Josh Olufemii has a wonderfully quick and simple tutorial to show you how easy it is to use, and how it can speed up your workflow.
I was surprised to learn that sliced bread wasn’t ‘invented’ until 1928. Considering how long bread has been around, you would have thought someone would have gotten the idea to sell it pre-sliced at some earlier point in human history. None the less, this simple time-saving idea dazzled and delighted people who were on the go.
In more ways than one, the Scene Edit Detection feature in Premiere Pro is even better than pre-cut pieces of bread. It’s incredibly easy to use and it will save you a ton of time when you’re color grading, making changes to a master, or chopping up Broll that has been strung out into a clip.
Here is how easy it is to use:
- Drop the edited clip into a timeline in Premiere Pro
- Right Click, and Navigate to Scene Edit Detection…
- Select at least One of the Three Options
- Apply a cut at detected cut point
- This will just apply a cut to the clip everywhere it detects an edit point.
- Create bin of subclips from each detected cut point
- This will literally do exactly what it says.
- Create clip marker at each detected cut point
- This will literally do exactly what it says too.
- Apply a cut at detected cut point
- Select Analyze
- Wait a moment for that analysis to complete
- And you’re done.
There really isn’t much to this feature other than that, but how it can improve your workflow is immeasurable. I’ve spent hours of my life inserting edits at cut points to remove and re-edit shots from master cuts, color grade clips, and pull selects from an edit. An outsider might not see how useful this could be, but anything that can save you time in post and increase your efficiency is a dream – after all, production keeps adding more and more tasks for us to do every day.
*Tip to production: We hear you say “we’ll fix it in post” on the audio track, and we always wonder what you mean by “we”.
DaVinci Resolve
This feature has been a part of DaVinci Resolve for a very long time. They call it “Scene Cut”, and colorists use it to grade textless masters in ProRes HQ 4444 because it’s easier than having to handle massive raw footage files and terabytes of data.
I’m not sure why it took this long for this feature to make its way into Premiere, but (to me) it seems way more useful in a purpose built editing application where re-editing after the fact is increasingly becoming the norm.
About Sliced Bread…
When sliced bread was invented, (and this is true) there were efforts made by government officials in the US to ban it because they felt it created more waste. It wasn’t long before people stood up and declared to their elected officials how important those pre-cut pieces were to their morale and day-to-day routines.
We compare lots of things to sliced bread, and often the analogy doesn’t work or is just a passing joke. Never the less, this feature is even better than sliced bread, and sliced bread is really good. I would never make that comparison if this feature wasn’t that much better.
[source: Josh Olufemii]
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