Adobe Shows Off Slick New 'Auto Reframe' Feature

One of the tricky things about modern video consumption is that it's watched on many different devices with vastly different aspect ratios. Adobe recently showed off a new feature that will make this issue much easier to deal with by automatically and dynamically cropping a video to match the desired aspect ratio while simultaneously keeping the most important action in frame.

The feature, dubbed "Auto Reframe," is slated to launch in Premiere Pro for Mac later this year. Leveraging Adobe's Sensei machine learning technology, a user can select a desired aspect ratio, such as a portrait orientation for mobile devices, and the program will automatically follow the important action in the scene and constantly reframe the video specifically to keep the desired parts in the crop. Of course, the majority of the time, a videographer shoots in a landscape format, but as more and more video is consumed in a portrait orientation on mobile devices, creatives are left with the sometimes tedious task of manually reframing the video as the action moves across the original frame. If Adobe's new feature can effectively automate this task, it should help videographers save a lot of time, particularly when they're creating content for social media. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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9 Comments

Oh yeah! They showed a sneak peak of this at Adobe Max last year. This will be really handy for IG stories.

Why not just make one that creates a horizontal video so we can end this vertical crap that apple created.

why are phone sensors not just freaking SQUARE and solve all of this nonsense? crop in post to desired ratio and size. badabing

I guess, that's why Mike wrote "crop in post".

Hoping for a 6x6 sensor in the future!

Hardly new technology. Video aspect ratio resizing has been necessary since the advent of video. Film formatting for Television was the first thing people wanted.
Back then we called it Pan and Scan to slide the point of interest on wide format films like Vista Vision on 4x3 TV screens.

Was there software that did the Pan and Scan for you? Or was it what they refer to in the video as a "manual and tedious process"? I don't think they're suggesting the idea is new, just that they've taken the gruntwork out of it for you.

Yea, you could set it up in AVID to track the subjects.

As we move into an era of multi-camera phones, it would be really smart of both Android and Apple to use one of the extra camera to capture landscape video when the phone is in portrait orientation. Capturing both simultaneously would allow you to share either style of video making this AI approach much easier.