Short post here, even though the broader topic — things Adobe left out from Premiere — deserves page upon page of complaints! Some features, like virtual reality and color grading, have just begun to mature on the Creative Cloud platform, yet often the sweetest things in life are simplest: and sometimes to our surprise, the most useful.
Take, for example, the under-utilized inroad to Adobe’s messily-coded Premiere bloat: extensions. I suspect there’s some community out there of extension developers, but to be honest (without having scrubbed the ‘net to find them), I’ve only seen one: PluralEyes by Red Giant Software. Even so, as much as I find that core software indispensable for multi-camera shoots (basically, everything for me), Red Giant’s extension-based workflow simply isn’t as snappy as XML export — so I always end up bypassing the extension, and simply firing up the stand-alone application to sync up Premiere projects. It gives me more control.
Another, far less sophisticated example is (embarrassingly) this: for years, I’ve been taking notes while editing films by typing into text files. For me, writing onto paper is a non-starter: I can’t keep up (it’s a generational thing)! With the need to type out my revisions quickly, on-the-fly, I actually go through the tedium of re-arranging my windows to leave room for the bare-bones Notepad text application bundled with Windows. Truly, you can’t get more primitive than that. On the other hand, it’s worked out alright: I save my editing notes into a Dropbox folder dedicated to each Premiere project, and I can pull them up anywhere. And onscreen, I read from that Notepad document while effectuating the changes in Premiere.
Granted, I’m flipping back and forth between applications (unable to pause/navigate using hotkeys), ruining my window layouts, and wasting screen real estate in the process, thus failing to take advantage of Adobe’s tabbed windows architecture. I really wish I could just save notes into my Premiere projects. Dammit.
Hey Adobe! Thought of creating something like that? You did a massive re-branding a few years ago after all, calling yourselves the Creative Cloud!
Of course, no.
But along came Zach Williams and Lucas J. Harger. With elegant simplicity, and svelte layout designs: they dunnit.
You can get it now at PostNotes.app. I note that although Adobe deprecated its Extension Manager, Post Notes should be installed using the free, open-source ZXP Installer available at this link. The developers have recently issued a major upgrade to their extension with a version 2.0 that adds more elegant text, formatting including lists or bullets, and embedded timecodes into your notes for clickable cross-reference.
Now, show them love! And post notes.
Hi Paul,
I just came across your post. I’ve been at Adobe for a long time (a year after Premiere 1.0, in fact!) but just recently moved into the video team.
My title is “Senior Product Manager, Video & Audio Cloud Workflows” – a title long enough that I literally keep it in Notes for easy copying and pasting! – and what you’re asking about is right up my alley.
We are definitely thinking about what you’re asking for as part of a bigger effort to improve how people collaborate on projects. That’s primarily focused on multiple people working together but also covers the scenario where a single person is working on multiple devices.
Let me know if you’d like to chat sometime about what we’re thinking about.
Regards,
Fergus