Premiere Pro World Conference 2014

Over the past weekend I was lucky to attend the Adobe Premiere Pro World Conference in San Jose, presented by Future Media Concepts and Adobe. The only reason I was able to go was because I won a free spot in the ‘Re-tweet’ sweepstakes and stayed with a friend! While Indie Nari is still primarily a passion project, saving real dollars is always lovely 😉

The three day conference about the Hub of Adobe Premiere products for video professionals was eye-opening and inspiring. Even though I signed up for Creative Cloud two months ago, I haven’t explored the full potential of ALL the tools available! You can write your script/story in Adobe Story, which uses Metadata to create production schedules, prop lists, locations, cast names etc. On set you can start ingestion with Adobe Prelude, in which you can sort, select in and out points, make series or stitch many takes of the same shot into one long series. Then use Premiere Pro to edit footage from ANY camera in one click, PrePro CC figures out codecs and matches footage from different cameras on one timeline! Audition and Speed Grade for Audio mixing and vision processing, Adobe AfterFX for special effects. I also learnt about a ton of plug ins that are easily usable in the Adobe ecosytem, some awesome ones like RedGiant are free.

The first day was an introduction to the History of Adobe Premiere Pro by the incredibly smart and sincere engineers, testers and marketers at Adobe. There were jokes galore about how far Premiere Pro has come as a NLE since 1983. Since the start there have been 50 releases and 30 million lines of code written! Mind boggling!

Day 2 was when the sessions with experts started. I had a very hard time deciding which sessions to attend, there were 4 classes a day, with 4 sessions playing at the SAME TIME! That was a bummer, as it really was luck of the draw..so out of a potential 16 sessions I only did 4 per day. I had that old familiar feeling, I have at Film festivals..am I at the best possible film, I could be at, right now? Oh Well, that aside, at least I got to do 4 sessions on each day.

I got to meet a brilliant editor from LA, Christine Steele who has done countless commercials, docs and narrative films. She is also a teacher who makes videos at Lynda.com. Her class ‘Beyond the Basics’ was fantastic, she talked about, you guessed it, going beyond the basics! We learnt key board short cuts and workflows from her. She is very organized and her session was packed with useful information. I meant what I said in my twitter post about her

When I grow up I want to edit like this queen @Premiere_World Christine Steel #CreateNow pic.twitter.com/IZV4AkXUMI

— anjalika sharma (@indienari) July 13, 2014

The session with Luisa Winters about key framing in PrePro was very informational and helpful. Luisa’s great sense of humor and self-generated sound fx were very entertaining!

Another highlight was the Keynote by Adam Epstein the Editor for Saturday Night Live, ads and promos. Their team makes a new short film every week, concepts are thrown about on Monday, final script is on Wednesday. Pre-production starts on Wednesday evening, shoots are generally on Thursday or Friday, for a Saturday night show!!! Edit starts on set with ingesting and logging on Adobe Prelude, while the shoot is going on. Final ‘picture lock’ is a hurtling train to the finish line..sometimes the East coast doesn’t even get to watch the final graded version because when its 11:30pm on the East Coast..it is an immovable Deadline! In the past he has played live to broadcast right off the timeline!! Can you imagine that stress?

Other great sessions were with Eran Stern, a visual special FX designer from Israel. He gave us a lot of great ideas for plugins that work seamlessly with Premiere Pro, he didn’t speak too much, his style was restrained, but the amount of useful stuff he packed in was huge!

Jarle Leirpoll a filmmaker and editor from Norway shared the ‘Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro’, he is writing a book soon with the same name, that should be out in October. I am definitely getting myself a copy. His website has many free graphics and title templates that can be imported and used in PrePro. Jarle said, “If one person in the world has created something, it should be shared, so no other editor has to waste their time to create that effect again.” Way to build community 🙂 Check out his website.

Another super informative session was by Jeff Greenberg, he teaches regularly with FMC and has written books on Premiere Pro. He is awesome!

I couldn’t believe I was hob-nobbing with all these pros on a weekend away from the family. One moment I’m complaining about how alone I am and the next I am surrounded by all these amazing professionals!

Kanen Flowers, the creative Director of That Studio a media house that has produced a slew of extremely popular podcasts in the industry. From ‘That Post Show’, to Snarky TV, ‘Ruining it for Everyone’, they are also working on two feature length narratives Hero Punk and 18:20 a sci-fi feature. Mr. Prolific shared so many useful things about how he successfully runs a company, that is practically as diverse as the UN! With talented ‘makers’ from across the globe. He was very candid, approachable and really all about the community. A creative genius, who I sense has a LOT more to come. They are working on two original features with a ton of special FX, podcasts, commercials, vlogs…whew. I did say prolific.

I was sad to have missed out on Rich Harrington, Maxim Jago and numerous others for want of time…

But all in all I am feeling very empowered and ready to take my business to the next level!

Thank you Future Media Concepts and Adobe for an inspiring and empowering weekend. Grateful for all the wonderful connections I made in my new stomping grounds, California!