Adobe Announces New Innovations in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and More at IBC 2017

Adobe is updating its video applications and adding new features across the board. Many of these features include improvements for editing virtual reality content, smarter automated tasks, and some other features modeled after Final Cut 7, which Apple announced will not be supported in its upcoming MacOS High Sierra update.

Capitalizing on the lack of Final Cut Pro 7 in the latest release and for those who don’t want to switch to Final Cut Pro X, Adobe updated its applications to include features such as support for having multiple projects at once open to allow for a simple drag and drop of clips or sequences from one project to another without having to export and re-import between projects in Premiere Pro CC.
Also, Premiere Pro will feature a collaborative workflow that allows for multiple users to organize content at the same time. Editors can simply lock others out of clip and then unlock for editing again once they’re finished. Meanwhile, users can now convert a project to a Team Project, which allows versioning, history, tracked changes, and autosaving, all providing unlimited undos for any changes made done locally.
Premiere Pro will also feature a new Close Gap function to bring clips together with ease after editing shot duration. Previously, one would have to drag each clip after a duration change in order to touch the next clip and remove the lost space in between clips. Now, however, users can simply highlight all of the separated clips and use the Contorl/Command + G shortcut to group those clips and close the gaps. It’s not quite FCP X’s magnetic timeline, but it takes the headache out of some of the same issues that solves nonetheless. Premiere Pro also now doubles the available label colors to 16 colors that can be edited to any color you wish.
In an exciting move that will save time, there is now a Responsive Design Time feature that allows one to set an intro and outdo duration for clips. This will tell Premiere Pro which parts toward the beginning or end of a clip not to touch when making certain changes to duration, which means many of these changes will no longer require reworking of transitions, since those duration shifts will be made entirely by trimming the middle of the clip and not the intro or outdo.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality editing gets some new features, including being able to bring the timeline into view for editing VR in VR. When doing so, the timeline is optimized for editing in VR space.
Also, VR transitions and effects now apply to the VR content and not to the 2D projection before it is converted to the VR image. Those that edit VR know that effects often don’t show properly, because when the projection is processed, there is a gap in coverage for the effect because it didn’t take into account the full spherical projection. The result: effects for VR the way that they should be done.
Occasionally, when moving from one shot that ends with a horizontal motion and entering another shot that begins with a motion moving toward the viewer, for instance, this change in direction of motion can be jarring. To combat this, there is now a new Rotate Sphere tool that allows for rotation of the spherical projection to create movement in the direction in which the previous clip may have ended.
Finally, a new “Light Rays” transition made specifically for VR gives an effect similar to going through wormhole. However, this sounds much cheesier and less usable than it really is. For VR content, this is actually a slick transition effect that may make quite a bit of sense at times.

After Effects and Audition

After Effects and Audition also got some nice updates. Data-driving animation is a new focus for After Effects. You can bring data sets right into AE and have it comprehend and animate accordingly in a number of ways. There is now much less code writing required since the data does the animation. If the data is changed, the animation changes. Performance increases also are a welcome addition, where layer transforms and motion blur are now GPU-accelerated, improving these features from 2-3 frames per second to 15-16 frames per second on the same system, for instance.
Audition has a new ducking option to automatically have a soundtrack duck behind certain types of audio that are automatically analyzed and identified. Throughout the session, Audition can, for instance, recognize when someone is speaking and duck the audio appropriately, letting you adjust the effect with changes to the speed of the faders and intensity of ducking. Of course, you can still go in and make manual changes to these edits as well.
Finally, time code is now displayed over video and can be tweaked with varying opacity, size, and position within the frame. You can also select between selected media or full session time codes to display.

Finally, Character CC got a few updates, and video content from Reuters and Pond5 will be coming to Adobe Stock.