I've checked with one of the SpeedGrade guys and gotten some additional information about the SpeedGrade questions raised here.
There were two topics raised above:
1. SDI monitoring
2. round-tripping between Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade
about #1, SDI monitoring:
SpeedGrade doesn't use Mercury Transmit.
SpeedGrade does use the nVidia Quadro SDI solutions on Windows. As Premiere Pro can use the same hardware as well, it's simple to create a built-to-purpose workstation that works great for both applications. While this may be a bit disappointing for many people who already own AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, Bluefish cards, and others, it's still a great value for everyone who wants to add a dedicated grading system with excellent performance.
Be sure to take into account the hardware that you'd need to buy and use for comparable performance with other color grading systems when making comparions. We think that total cost of ownership of a hardware system built for SpeedGrade is quite competitive with the total cost of ownership for other grading systems.
That said, we
certainly acknowledge that many people won't be able to go for wide deployment of SpeedGrade before they can use hardware that they own already. That's why we're working hard on making this better for future versions---specifically, we're working on getting Mercury Transmit into SpeedGrade in the future. I can't make promises on specifically when (or even whether) this will happen, but I can say that we're working on it.
about #2, integration with Premiere Pro:
In CS6, we have a really solid workflow with Send To SpeedGrade that is ultimately easy to use, hard to break, and should be applicable to everything that's short-form.
For long-form work, we have a very well established, proven (and also hard to break) workflow via EDL export. While this is not the most modern, it's highly functional and doesn't require the editor or the colorist to become an expert in XML tweaking.
But, again, we certainly acknowledge that tighter integration would be even better... and we're working on it. Improving our color workflows is a very high priority for us.
Here's that feature-request link again, for those who want to give specific requests:
http://www.adobe.com/go/wish
I don't want to sound like we're making excuses, but I do ask you to realize that we only just acquired the SpeedGrade technology very recently and didn't have much time for integration work for CS6. Personally, I'm very impressed with what the SpeedGrade team was able to accomplish. Anyone who has used the previous versions of SpeedGrade should notice that the UI is much improved, as well as many other advances.
BTW, we have a bunch of video tutorials on the
Adobe website about using SpeedGrade. Check 'em out.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
product manager, professional video software
After Effects team blog
Premiere Pro team blog
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