Adobe Adding Team Collaboration to Premiere Pro

Highly anticipated for years, Adobe have finally released their team collaboration system for Premiere Pro. Until now, only large enterprises would be able to do this. However, is it powerful enough?

Adobe Anywhere was the previous endeavor into this space and was a real sign that Adobe was taking on Avid’s industry-leading collaboration tools. However, Adobe Anywhere became a solution for larger companies, and it stopped there. There wasn’t a price tag on this system; you had to call them and ask. While that works for CNN, it doesn’t for most others. The only other option was Frame.io, which is jam-packed full of features but again doesn’t always suit the smaller productions. In some ways, Adobe’s playing catchup here, but in other ways, they’re aiming for a no-frills system that’s built right into the software.

How It Works

The new system runs in tandem with cloud storage in order to keep a team’s project synced up. Create the project, invite your friends via email, and that’s it. Editors can have their footage on a shared drive or even a local drive. This means that the entire team can work from anywhere in the world if they all have the same source footage. Editors can then see previous versions alongside the new cuts, which makes it a bit like Apple’s Time Machine. And for the self-conscious editors out there, you’ll be glad to know that the rest of the team won’t see your work until you push it over to them.

Is It Worth It?

Is it too basic to be useful? I believe that Adobe’s really onto something here. This system is a stripped back, simple way of doing things. Trying to bring it to the same level as an editing house is unachievable, and there’s no need for everybody to be connected to a central server. This is for the small crews that want a reliable collaboration tool but don’t need the plethora of features that come with Frame.io or Avid.

We’ll be seeing this in the upcoming versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Prelude. Will we see some of this tech reach over to Photoshop and Lightroom? Or is it even needed in photo editing? That remains to be seen.