Adobe SpeedGrade

~ the eulogy ~

Color grading used to happen in a room you booked by the hour, with calibrated monitors and an operator whose entire job was the look of the thing. The edit happened somewhere else and earlier, on different machines. Moving between the two cost you a day and a tape.

IRIDAS built SpeedGrade for that room. It was a German outfit selling into digital intermediate work, and the piece of it that turned out to matter most was the deep color engine underneath, called Lumetri, which shipped in spring 2011. Adobe bought the IRIDAS technology later that year and put SpeedGrade into Creative Suite 6 on 7 May 2012, at suite prices rather than facility prices.

Then Adobe connected the two applications. Direct Link, in the CC 2014 cycle, let an editor throw a Premiere sequence into SpeedGrade and pull the grade back without rendering anything in between. That was the headline feature and it was also the start of the problem, because once the applications could talk that fluently the obvious question was why anyone was switching applications at all.

Premiere Pro CC 2015 answered it with the Lumetri Color panel, which put the wheels and the curves in the editing window where the footage already was. Two years later Adobe stopped pretending there was a reason to keep both. On 22 August 2017 development on SpeedGrade CC ended, and product manager Patrick Palmer said what everyone could see in the numbers: Lumetri use had climbed, and the vast majority of SpeedGrade users had already moved.

~ the dossier ~

~ what adobe actually bought ~

Adobe bought a set of technologies rather than a company. The purchase handed it an application and an engine, and only one of those was still running ten years later. Lumetri is the reason the deal reads as a success in Adobe's ledger and as a death in this one. The color math went into Premiere and After Effects and stayed there.

~ the room, and who was in it ~

My video work has never gone past cutting clips, so I have no standing to tell you what a trackball panel feels like under your hands at two in the morning. SpeedGrade's users were colorists, a job title that barely exists outside of a few cities, and the product spoke to them in their own vocabulary from the first screen.

What I can read from here is the price shape. Software sold in dollars to facilities rather than to people has a different kind of customer than anything I ever installed, and when Adobe folded it into a monthly subscription the customer changed again. The people who lost SpeedGrade in 2017 had mostly stopped opening it already.

~ what survived ~

The .look files do. Adobe kept the format readable, so a grade built in any version of SpeedGrade still loads into Premiere Pro and After Effects, and the 3D LUTs export cleanly to anything else. The application has not been downloadable for years. The looks people made in it are still sitting in project folders, applying themselves to footage shot long after the program that created them stopped running.

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