Adobe Releases Updates To Creative Cloud Video Applications

Adobe today announces release of updates to its Creative Cloud family of video applications.  Fresh on the heels of Adobe’s release of Productions for Premiere Pro, today’s updates represent a new approach to CC updates.  Beginning with today’s release, Adobe will increase the frequency of updates with new features as they are ready rather than waiting longer between updates with more features per update.  This approach to updates is augmented by a more robust public beta program in which users will have the opportunity to test products in development, providing Adobe ongoing feedback. An example of this is a beta plug-in enabling ProRes RAW in Windows environments.

Accompanying today’s release is an enhanced approach to greater performance and stability. In addition to the public beta program, analytics garnered from release versions of applications help prioritize fixes and improvements needed.

Since last year’s introduction of Premiere Pro’s System Compatibility Report, Adobe has been able to assist users in identifying application performance issues as well as feeding those results back to Adobe. The System Compatibility Report helps users identify and repair among the main issues found—out of date drivers.  It can generate a System Compatibility Report file both for user and for Adobe.

Other areas which this update addresses as well as targets for future updates is optimizing performance and speed of operations.

But let’s look at the new features and improvements in each of the CC video apps.

Premiere Pro

This one is major. Premiere Pro (as well as After Effects) gains promised support of ProRes RAW in both MacOS and Windows. Windows users must download a specific free plug-in to enable the feature—essentially the release version of the beta driver.

As we have seen over the past several weeks with Atomos announcing additional ProRes RAW support, RAW editing will see greater hardware support and now by virtue of Adobe support, a far wider editing base.

ProRes RAW Support:

Pro ResRAW Settings - This Image Demonstrates the ProRes RAW source setting in Premiere Pro, including the exposure toggle.

Other new features include support for audio files in Creative Cloud Libraries. Previous only video and still images were supported.

Creative Cloud Libraries:

Audio Support in Libraries - Support for files in Libraries enables Premiere Pro users to save, organize and share frequently used audio assets for easy access. 

The Pen tool now has support for creating Bezier curves. It will now also be possible to simply the view in the Effect filters tab to show only attributes that have adjusted parameters or keyframes.

The Pen Tool:

Essential Graphics Pen Tool - This Image Shows the improved Pen tool with better support for Bezier curves, enabling greater precision for creating lines and shapes.

Windows machines get hardware encoding for H.264 files and Nvidia and AMD GPU’s will encode H.265 (HEVC).

After Effects

In addition to Pro Res RAW support there are a few new shape choices available.

Tapered Shape Strokes can create animatable pointed, wavy or rounded strokes on shape layers. The Concentric Shape Repeater offers the ability to create offset paths to make copy of paths which can radiate inward or outward.

Tapered Shape Strokes and Offset Paths:

Adobe also notes that it continues to work on speed improvements in After Effects.

Audition

While it may be a small feature, this one solves a lot of headaches. Audition now has automatic device switching, switching audio input or output device to the default device (Mac only, sorry Windows). An example here might be unplugging headphones which were the default audio output device. Audition would then recognize the next device for output and, when the headphones are plugged back in, it would switch back to headphones.

And there is touted improved support for relinking media and identifying offline files.

Character Animator

Character Animator continues to grow in popularity and user base. So it will continue to see enhanced development. In this release, there is an improved timeline management ability which allows more control over modifying and identifying tracks.  Recognizing that not everyone of us who loves and uses Character Animator is a design artist, there is a whole new collection of background puppets that allow triggering animating elements of the scene behind the main character.

Triggered Animating Elements:

Character Animator - Animate elements of scenes behind the main characters.

Premiere Rush

This one is another major leap for Rush. Projects can be resized automatically to a 4:5 aspect ratio for Instagram or Facebook videos.  On iOS devces, Back Camera Switching enables capturing from back camera directly into Rush. And finally, using the Files app (iOS), it is possible to import media directly into Rush.

Premiere Rush - Automatic Resized Aspect Ratios for Social Media.

These updates are available immediately for Creative Cloud subscribers.