HITS

Adobe Touts Premiere Pro and After Effects Enhancements

Adobe on Sept. 15  touted its latest Creative Cloud Video offerings, introducing enhancements for its Premiere Pro video editing software and After Effects digital visual effects software.

“Although we’re sadly not in person at IBC this year” due to the pandemic, “we still have some exciting product news to share,” Francis Crossman, Premiere Pro product manager, said at the start of a virtual press conference ahead of the announcement.

The Adobe Premiere Pro team “has been analyzing workflows from start to finish to identify areas that can be streamlined – always with the goal of accelerating editorial and simplifying tasks, while ensuring the user retains full control over their content,” he told reporters.

The enhancements help users create streamlined workflows and maximum speed, according to Adobe.

“One result of this is an upcoming new feature that we’re very excited about,” which is Quick Export, Crossman said, noting it “will be entering public beta.” It  is a “brand-new, time-saving feature that offers easy access to the most popular and frequently used export settings right from the header bar in Premiere Pro,” he said.

“We recognize that in today’s world, more and more content is expected to be pumped out faster than ever before and we’re really focused on improving efficiencies,” he pointed out, calling Quick Export a “first step in a reimagining of the way people work.”

Users can opt for the default high-quality H.264 output with matched Source Settings or choose from a short list of H.264 presets to reduce the size of export files.

Also new to Premiere Pro, in the September release are: Scene Edit Detection (which entered public beta in June), allowing editors to find cuts in previously edited video sequences faster and more accurately, via the use of Adobe Sensei machine learning and artificial intelligence technology; and High Dynamic Range (HDR) for Broadcasters, allowing users to produce programming in Rec2100 HLG HDR for modern HDR broadcasting, he said.

Scene Edit Detection “received great feedback from our customers and is a testament to how our public beta significantly helps us with feature development,” Crossman told reporters. Thanks to the public beta, Adobe was “able to streamline” the user interface and “add valuable functionality,” he said.

Meanwhile, “HDR is growing in importance because consumers are wanting better quality and lifelike imagery when watching” content on screens, including sports events, he said.

Also, “during the pandemic, with so many people at home and apart, HDR can help make people feel like they’re right there,” he noted.

Discussing what’s new with After Effects, Victoria Nece, its product manager, told reporters: “Graphic artists rely on After Effects for motion design and working in 3D has become essential in producing compelling content for broadcast and advertisers – especially for things like product commercials that use both 2D and 3D design elements.”

And “to modernize the 3D experience, we’re currently testing” these After Effects features in public beta, she said, pointing first to 3D Transform Gizmos, which helps users “navigate a scene faster and more intuitively,” scale, position and rotate layers with helpful guides that show how far a layer or object has been moved and rotated, and switch between gizmo modes to focus on a single task and make precision adjustments efficiently.

Next, she pointed to new camera navigation tools that she said allow users to intuitively orbit, pan and dolly around objects using customizable keyboard shortcuts, and also include a new default scene camera that streamlines scene setup, and the ability to quickly add multiple cameras for various viewpoints.

Notable performance improvements for the latest release, meanwhile, include: Channel effects are now GPU-accelerated, providing up to 1.65x faster performance in After Effects, and include Minimax, Shift Channels, Set Channels and Channel Combine; OpenEXR Previews for multi-part and multi-channel files are now up to 3x faster; faster effects scanning for VST3 and Audio Unit plugins in Audition and Premiere Pro allowing faster launch times for users with third-party audio plugins, while, on macOS, effects scanning is up to 15x faster and up to 10x faster on Windows; and ProRes multicam performance in Premiere Pro is now up to 2x better, accelerating editing workflows with this widely used format, Adobe said.