8 Ways to Use Palette Gear in Premiere Pro For A More Efficient Video Editing Workflow

by Nina Vasic May 13, 2019

Photo credit: frame.io

Delivering quality edits on time for clients is often on the top of the list in terms of priorities for professional video editors, but keeping up with demanding timelines while maintaining an exceptionally high quality of work can be a challenge.

We designed Palette Gear to meet the needs and demands of the complexity of creative work. Not only does Palette significantly increase workflow efficiency while editing photos in apps like Lightroom, Photoshop, and Capture One, but it can also help video and audio editors working in Premiere Pro. In Premiere, Palette was designed primarily for use with Lumetri color, transport controls, keyframe motion & effects, and audio mixing.

Palette also has strong feature parity between Lightroom Classic + Premiere Lumetri and Audition CC + Premiere Audio to ensure ease of use app-to-app.

Here are 8 ways to use Palette Gear for a more efficient and less strenuous workflow in Premiere Pro.

1. Use Palette Gear to Color Grade More Efficiently in Premiere

Control key Lumetri functions from the basic, creative, curves or vignette panels in Premiere Pro with Palette Gear. When color grading, you can watch a clip in real time and make color adjustments with Palette Gear simultaneously, something that is impossible to do with a keyboard.

Filmmakers Rob and Rich at The Film Look explain their efficient color grading workflow using Palette Gear below:

Use Palette's Multi-function Dials for Lumetri adjustments that cover a larger range. For example:

adjusting your white and black points
saturation and contrast to bring the vibrance back to flat log footage

Palette's High Sensitivity Sliders are great for Lumetri adjustments over a smaller range where small tweaks make a major difference. That is because, unlike dials, sliders have maximum and minimum points that you can custom assign. For example

matching exposure and color between A and B cams
sharpening and noise reduction
effects like grain, vignetting, and faded film

2. Use Palette Gear for Keyframed Motion, Color, and Effects

Palette automatically adds keyframes at the playhead as you make adjustments. This means that you can keyframe literally any effect or clip adjustment without having to touch the effects panel. For example: control position, scale, and rotation to add motion to your clips using a Palette Multi-function Dial. Or keyframe your Lumetri adjustments to progressively change the mood and feel of a long take.

3. Use Palette Gear for Faster Timeline Navigation

Use Palette Gear for even faster and less strenuous timeline navigation in Premiere like going between edit points and cut points quickly. Palette's Multi-function Dial is the perfect fit for navigation and motion functions like jog, playhead, and X/Y position.

Palette Gear hooks directly into Premiere's API so you can do things like Premiere's playhead function like press and turn a Palette dial for dramatically increased sensitivity to fly through frames or turn the dial normally to precisely move frame by frame.

4. Use Palette Gear for Audio Mixing in Premiere

Perhaps you're really fast at editing and color grading, but find that audio is among the slowest parts of your workflow. Automate volume and pan in real time to create a balanced mix of dialogue, music, and effects. This can be mixed using the track-level OR clip-level volume and pan faders. Use a single Palette dial to adjust the volume of any selected clip with automatic keyframing. Toggle Mute and Solo for each track independently.

5. Control All of Your Toggle Features: Razor/Ripple, Linking/Unlinking Clips, Add Edit Points, and More

Palette Gear's Arcade-style Buttons are great for features you can toggle on and off like linking and unlinking clips, adding edit point to all tracks, or razor and ripple delete selected clips without changing your active tool, or add and remove effects, transitions, and looks across your timeline with one press. Palette buttons also make a lot of sense for shortcuts that require two hands to access or custom programming.

6. Master the Use of Macros

Arguably one of the more powerful button feature for Premiere Pro is Palette Gear's macro mode, now available in the beta app. Macro mode lets you assign a sequence of key strokes to a single press of a button. See how Peter from Cut to the Point uses macros with Palette in the video below:

7. Effortlessly Scale 4K, 5K, 6K, 8K Clips into 4K or 1080 Timelines

You can set a max parameter on Palette sliders to easily and quickly scale clips. For example you can program a slider so it never scales below 85%, 75% or 50%, which is extremely useful when dealing with 5K, 6K 8K video files that you want to scale down to fit on a 4K timeline. You can scale your image and using a Palette dial, turn it to the right to scale up or turn left to scale down.

8. Get more precision and sensitivity with Palette custom control settings

By adjusting the sensitivity of Palette dials, you change how much of your effect is applied per rotation. Use a high sensitivity for functions where you're regularly making large changes and low sensitivity where you adjustments are very small and precision is paramount. Press the dial to quickly return any value to it's default.

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You can do all of this with just 7-14 Palette modules by creating multiple profiles for each stage of your workflow effectively adding layers of functionality to even a simple kit: one profile for editing, one for color grading, another for audio, etc.

Try Palette risk-free for 30 days in your video editing workflow or your money-back. That's our better editing guarantee.

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