Premiere CS5 Time Warp - is it gone or not?

[Daniel Raebiger]

not only useful, essential. I have a couple of major projects relying on that filter and ran into this a few weeks back when we had to make edits to one of those projects.

[Trevor Dennis]

Wow. I was new to Premiere Pro with CS5 and AE with CS6, and have not used Time Warp. But out of interest, had a look round and found this comparison between Time Warp and PP Time Remapping. One is smooth as silk, and the other like poorly done stop motion!

Slow Motion Test: Adobe Time Remapping vs. Timewarp - YouTube

[Daniel Raebiger]

timewarp was one of the best filters ever in Premiere and seperated to product by far from any competitor - at least in terms of time remapping. the now called time remapper is barly usable when slowing stuff down :(

[Ann Bens]

You can still fill out a wishform to get the feature back (but I very much doubt)
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform...?name=wishform

[Trevor Dennis]

Ann, check post #12 in this Adobe forum thread

Adobe Community: CS5: Where is Time Warp ?

That's an Adobe staff member more or less saying "Enough already!!"

I used to be a regular poster to the Adobe Photoshop forum, but became dissolutioned with Adobe's apparent disregard for their actual customers. I was also fed up with paying half as much again for my Adobe apps as people in America. The last straw was when Adobe - among others like Apple - simply ignored an official enquiry into American companies price hiking, started by Australian MP Ed Husic.

Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

Anyway... Bottom line, don't hold your breath waiting for Adobe to take notice of customer requests.

[Ann Bens]

I do not believe Adobe dropped the filter just for fun, there must have been a good reason.

[Battle Vaughan]

Oddly, TimeWarpFilter.dll is present in the CS6 premiere root directory, but it is not recognized. Maybe they just haven't worked the bugs out? It's a pretty complex filter....and this dll is about twice the size of the CS4 version. Maybe a clue that it's not completely gone.....or maybe it's presence has something to do with integrating with AE, just tossing out ideas...

[Daniel Raebiger]

interesting find!
I read through the adobe thread and don't quite get the sarcastic response from one of the staff. the filter worked REALLY well, had good performance (especially compared to Twixtor...) and was compared to other NLEs a real USP.

[Trevor Dennis]

Daniel, the Adobe staff members that post to the Adobe forums, do so in their own time out of a love for the product, and in the forums I have frequented, are always friendly, helpful, and obviously very knowledgeable. But the thing is, they are as much a victim of top-down driven company policy as we the end users are. During the time I spent — mostly on the Photoshop forum, but a wee while on the Premiere Pro hardware form — I encountered a good few dissatisfied folk. The staff members are obviously not allowed to comment on policy, but reading between the lines, they get fed up as well.

Wikipedia says Adobe currently has 9,925 employees, and I have read that the entire Photoshop development team numbers a mere 66 people! I do believe though, that senior members of the team, like Russell Brown, get a big say in which features to develop or leave for later. But staff member and regular forum poster Chris Cox, continually stresses how massif a task it is to change the code, because of interrelationships with existing code.

The retina display business was a good point. People had been complaining, and writing to the new features list, for ages because the high screen resolutions, on not necessarily large displays, were resulting in tiny tool icons. To a layperson like myself, it did not seem a big deal to increase the size of those tool icons, but Chris Cox promised it was a huge job. It eventually took the might of Apple, and the unstoppable tide of advancing technology re: the Retina displays, to make it happen. (well we are told it is in the pipeline and will be a free upgrade — I think)

I am very new to After Effects, and relatively new to Premiere Pro (I started with CS5) so don’t have any idea why the Time Warp filter disappeared, but it could be that people of the PP and AE development teams are as unhappy about it as we are.

[Charles W. Hull]

Originally Posted by Trevor Dennis

I am very new to After Effects, and relatively new to Premiere Pro (I started with CS5) so don’t have any idea why the Time Warp filter disappeared.....

My guess is it's a license issue. Time Warp is based on Kronos from the Foundry. It may be that Adobe decided the license wasn't worth it for PP, but it was for AE.

I'm happy with the AE version; works well.

[John Wiley]

Originally Posted by Trevor Dennis

Wow. I was new to Premiere Pro with CS5 and AE with CS6, and have not used Time Warp. But out of interest, had a look round and found this comparison between Time Warp and PP Time Remapping. One is smooth as silk, and the other like poorly done stop motion!

Slow Motion Test: Adobe Time Remapping vs. Timewarp - YouTube

Timewarp and Time Remapping are for different purposes - Timewarp uses motion estimation to create tween frames and render smooth slow motion from regular footage. Time Remapping takes the current frame and adjusts the playback speed via keframes and handles, giving you an accurate way to control speed increases/decreases. The best application of this is when using footage that was shot in slow motion (eg 240fps from the RED Epic), so you can smoothly and precisely transition from realtime to slow motion.

This still doesn't answer why Timewarp was taken out, I'm simply explaining why the Above test gave the results it did. Luckily for those with AE it's not much of a problem to use Dynamic Linking.

[Bart Walczak]

I sincerely do hope that the Time Remapping in CS7 will at the least have the possibility to use After Effects' Pixel Motion algorithm, because even with Dynamic Link, right now it is tedious to work with, especially if you want to make editorial changes later on.

Even if Time Warp had licencing issues, and the Pixel Motion is subpar to the real Optical Flow (Twixtor, Kronos or even FCP X), it is Adobe's technology, and it should not be any more problematic to port it to Premiere than it was with Warp Stabilizer. And we'd have something to work with. As for now, the speed changes algorithms in Premiere are awful for anything apart from speed-ups.

[Battle Vaughan]

With all respect to Charles and John, who probably know a lot more about AE than I do, I'm with Bart on this. The dynamic link and diddling around with AE is way cumbersome compared to just doing the filter in PPro. If Adobe can put the effect in AE, they should be able to leave it in Premiere, I would think.

I have long suspected that Adobe want to push everyone into buying the suites, and using them as a set of applications, none of them being really complete in themselves, by dumbing down Premiere into a basic timeline from which you link to the more specialized programs. Continuing PPro as a comprehensive standalone might cost them money....just my suspicious mind......

[George Kilroy]

Originally Posted by Daniel Raebiger

While Time Remapping remaps the time, Time Warp did what time remapping in after effect does: it calculates motion vectors and not just blends frames. you can slow 25p/30p footage down to 10-20% with time warp and get good results while time remapping gives you ugly blended frames.

I've never used Time Warp, in fact never knew about it as I'd only ever used Speed/Duration to change speed.
Can you tell me what the best setting would be on 1080x50i and 720P footage, if it makes any difference.
Method - Whole Frame , Frame Mix or Pixel Motion?
Adjust Time - Speed or Source Frame?