The ability to apply effects to master clips is a welcome addition. I believe this has been available in Avid Symphony for some time.  The implementation here in Premiere is a bit wonky though.  Selecting a clip in the timeline will show the effect controls in the “Effect Controls” palette but those controls will now disappear with the first mouse-click in the that window.  For some reason Premiere feels the need to switch the view in the palette to the Master clip side.  You need to double-click on a clip in the timeline to cause the controls to “stick” in the “Effect Controls” window.  I’ve been using this for over four months and I’m still not accustomed to the double-click. It drives me nuts when that “Effect Controls” palette goes blank!!  It also drives me nuts that I need to turn down the “carrot” in the “Effect Controls” palette to expose all the Motion properties for EVERY clip. The Motion properties should be exposed by default like they were in FCP7.  At least give me an option in the preferences to have these exposed by default.  Adding to the issues within the “Effect Controls” is the fact that you can’t TAB between all of the visible attributes like you can in After Effects.  All of these unnecessary clicks really slows down the process of applying and tweaking effects and effectively offsets any gains afforded by the ability to add effects to master clips.

When are the programming guys on the After Effects team, the Premiere team and the Photoshop team going to meet for a beer and discover that the list of available transfer modes are different for each program? Can we please get some consistency between these programs? <— Free suggestion for Adobe #11

I constantly feel like the Premiere audio workflow is fighting me at every turn.  It’s a mess. By default, all clips are imported with one stereo track.  This is useless for anything other than music and foley.  Any footage recorded with different mics on separate tracks needs to be imported as mono pairs or switched after import.  You can default to mono on import in the preferences but then all of your music and soundfx will come in as two tracks.  Pick your poison. Premiere also isn’t smart enough to disregard the audio tracks that have NO data.  <— Free suggestion for Adobe #12 This is something that FCPX has been doing since version 1.0 (or is that 10.0?).

Working with synced mono clips in the timeline is especially cumbersome.  Audio keyframes have to be manually added and manually adjusted to both tracks even if the tracks are linked resulting in twice the work.  Trying to link a pair of mono audio clips to a video clip is a multi-step process that involves unlinking the audio first. Audio dissolves can be added to linked clips but if you want to change the duration of the dissolve you have to manually select both transitions.  And for some reason the video transition is not linked to the audio transition.  Final Cut 7 handled linked mono audio clips the correct way.  Adobe should take note. <— Free suggestion for Adobe #13

For some reason the default order for clips when viewing a bin in thumbnail mode is “User Order”.  Premiere will default to this order even if you’ve never set clips in a specific order!!  I have to constantly select “Name” from the sort list to see the thumbnail in a sequential order.  For some reason this bin preference is not “sticky”.  Meaning that you need to reselect from the pulldown EVERY time you reopen this bin in thumbnail view.  And the visual data in thumbnail mode is terrible.  Color coded label info is non-existent and (maybe its me) but the shades of gray are very hard to discern when looking for a selected clip in a bin with lots of thumbnails.

For some reason “Snapping” doesn’t seem to work when dragging a video clip across tracks.

Why doesn’t the Label color chip in the project window have its own contextual menu like the label column in Ae?  Do I really need to see the entire contextual menu when I right-click on a color chip?  Just give me the label options like AE does.  And who named these colors? <— Free suggestion for Adobe #14

When working in the timeline why doesn’t the copy/paste command respect the track location of the copied clip(s)?  Hate the fact that I have to pay attention to track indicators before pasting. FCP7 handled this perfectly! <— Free suggestion for Adobe #15 

More free suggestions for Adobe:

#16 Why does selecting Undo after moving multiple clips in the timeline cause me to lose my selection?  This drives me nuts.

#17 Why isn’t the clip that I just pasted in the timeline the active/selected clip?

#18 The snap feature doesn’t work when dragging a clip across tracks in the timeline.

#19 I should be able to use the Pen tool to select audio keyframes on multiple audio clips in the timeline.

#20 I will buy stock in the the first company that designs an NLE that moves the downstream audio keyframes during a trim command!!

#21 Why can’t I see the audio waveform on the video clip that is in the Source monitor? Editing a Q&A session is so much easier when you can see the waveforms of the interviewer and interviewee.

#22 Why are the Waveform Monitor and Vector-scope buried in the Source/Program palettes?  I’ve spent way too much time trying to come up with a window layout that shows the Source, Program, Vector-scope and Waveform monitor at the same time.  I haven’t been successful!!

#23 Would love to have a “Favorite Effects” folder like the one in FCP7.

#24 Why can’t I keyframe the RGB Curves filter?  Am I missing something?

#25 Hey Adobe, background rendering.  Just saying.

For the life of me I can’t seem to figure out how to Sync my preferences and settings between computers using the Creative Cloud’s new sync feature.  Am I the only one?  And why aren’t these carried from the previous version during install?

And one more thing … Premiere is still only using the first core of your CPU.

Sorry for the long post.  Let me know your thoughts …

Lou …

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