The 2023 NAB Show is on this weekend (Apr 15, 2023 – Apr 19, 2023), but that hasn’t stopped Adobe from announcing some big improvements to Creative Suite ahead of the show.
Adobe announced industry-first innovations across its family of video applications, including AI-powered text-based video editing and automated colour tone-mapping capabilities in Premiere Pro.
In addition, significant GPU acceleration and dozens of workflow enhancements make this the fastest version of Premiere Pro ever released.
Adobe is also celebrating 30 years of After Effects, the world’s most popular motion design software for video professionals, adding a context-sensitive Properties Panel for enhanced user productivity, consistent colour support as well as performance optimisations.
Adobe’s latest innovations are designed to address the workflow needs of today’s professional editors and motion designers by automating time-intensive tasks, freeing creative professionals to spend more time shaping the stories they want to tell. Adobe also announced new innovations and partnerships that expand Frame.io’s industry-leading video collaboration platform to photography and PDF documents.
Industry Momentum
Adobe’s family of video applications has powered editing and visual effects for a record number of box office hits and marquee television shows including “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Missing,” “Atlanta,” and “The Bear.”
This year’s Academy Award-winning best picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Oscar winner “Navalny” and nearly two-thirds of movies shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival were edited in Premiere Pro.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also recognised Adobe Substance 3D, which has seen rapid adoption in the video industry, for transforming visual effects and animations in movies such as “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Dune,” “Star Wars; Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker,” “Frozen 2,” “Lightyear,” “Blade Runner 2049,” and “First Man.”
New Innovations
As the demand for content continues to accelerate – doubling over the last two years and expected to grow by five times over the next two years – video creators need tools to deliver high-quality content faster than ever before.
Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s machine learning and AI framework, Premiere Pro and After Effects now streamline video workflows and offer AI-powered editing that save production teams precious hours and significantly reduce costs.
Key updates to Premiere Pro include:
Text-Based Editing
represents a groundbreaking shift in post-production workflows. Premiere Pro is the only professional editing software to incorporate Text-Based Editing, revolutionising the way creators approach their craft by making video editing as simple as copying and pasting text.
Powered by Adobe Sensei, Text-Based-Editing automatically analyses and transcribes clips so editors, producers and assistants can simply copy and paste sentences into any order they want and instantly see them appear on the timeline. Transcripts can be searched in the transcript window to identify exact words and phrases.
Automatic Tone Mapping and Log Colour Detection
lets editors mix and match HDR footage from different sources into the same SDR project and get great looking, consistent colour. This means editors don’t need to use look-up tables (LUTs) or manually balance footage to get great looking images.
Premiere Pro Performance
Premiere Pro features significant under-the-hood improvements, and is the fastest version ever shipped. In addition to enhanced performance, new features include background auto save, system reset options and anEffects Manager for plug-ins.
GPU acceleration for AVC Intra and professional formats such as ARRI RAW, RED RAW, and Sony Venice V2, coupled with GPU accelerated video scopes, transitions, and title templates, make the editing experience lightning fast and responsive so editors can now work with 8K footage in the timeline.
Collaborative editing enhancements include Sequence Locking
enabling the active editors to lock a sequence so it becomes view-only for other editors, Presence Indicators to provide visibility on who is working in shared projects, and Work While Offline to allow editors to continue to work offline, then publish changes without overwriting others’ work when they return online.
Included with Creative Cloud, Frame.io support enables secure sharing, collaborative review and project management for Premiere Pro edits, including direct export, upload and Share for Review capabilities.
Premiere Pro improved format support
for RED V-Raptor X, ARRI Alexa 35 and Sony Venice v2 cameras; expanded Speech to Text support for Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish; GPU acceleration for debayering and transition effects; simpler track targeting; and the ability to export and render directly to Adobe Media Encoder.
New innovations in After Effects include:
The new Properties Panel
offers quick and easy access to the most important animation settings in one convenient panel. The Properties Panel is context-sensitive, automatically showing users the most important controls needed based on selections, cutting down on the time needed to navigate through the timeline and reducing the learning curve for new users.
New ACES and OpenColourIO
maintain consistent colours when sharing assets with other post-production apps to help users create more predictable and photo-realistic images in less time and with less effort.
Additional new features
deliver performance optimisations including faster timeline layer selection and multi-frame rendering of shapes – plus new keyboard shortcuts for Selectable Track Mattes. After Effects now helps users fix common issues without the need for IT expert assistance, including in-app troubleshooting for potential workflow issues, system performance optimisations, simple interfaces for enabling and disabling plug-ins and diagnostics to fix bottlenecks in caches and preferences.