Adobe’s Updates for Premiere Pro & After Effects – Refined Text-Based Editing, Speech Enhancement, True 3D Workspace

Software UpdateIBC 2023

by Mascha DeikovaSeptember 19^th, 2023

At IBC 2023 in Amsterdam, Adobe announced quite a few software improvements and new features that are already available in beta. These include several AI workflows in Premiere Pro, new Camera-to-cloud connections in Frame.io, and the first-ever true 3D workspace for motion graphics in After Effects. Let’s take a more detailed look at Adobe’s updates for filmmakers below!

As the company claims, those AI and 3D innovations across its family of video and audio applications should simplify and speed up different workflows. Some of those enhancements are user-requested.

Adobe’s top priority is delivering powerful tools that are designed with the editor in mind. This year, the Adobe Creative Cloud video team spoke with more than 1,000 professional editors to solicit feedback — much of which has been incorporated in today’s release.

From the official blog announcement

Improved text-based editing in Premiere Pro

You’re probably already familiar with this AI tool that Adobe incorporated into their editing software back in May. (If not, we wrote about it in detail here). Basically, it makes it possible for users to use automated transcriptions of the audio for a simple copy-and-paste text-based edit. This feature works in 18 different languages, and does it quite successfully.

What’s new here is the filler word detection. From now on, the artificial intelligence mechanism can identify “uhs”, “ums” and too-long pauses (you can choose the length yourself) in dialogue, and delete all of them in one click.

Adobe’s updates for filmmakers – speech enhancement

Another AI tool that performed so well that it was bound to land inside Adobe’s applications is their speech enhancement. You might have tested it on the Adobe Podcast platform, or read about it in our “AI tools for audio” compilation. This feature, based on the company’s neural network called Sensei, helps to turn an audio track of poor quality (whether due to a wrongly-placed mic, a bad location choice or because it’s from an archive) into a studio-like recording. Starting in the new software beta, you can use this tool directly in Premiere Pro in the “Essential Sound” panel. Here’s a brief showcase of how it works:

True 3D Workspace for motion graphics in After Effects

Well, that sounds like a huge improvement! For the first time in Adobe’s history, you can import 3D models directly into the After Effects workspace without additional plugins or software, as well as animate, light, shade, and render them. Moreover, you can combine 2D and 3D motion graphics in one unified composition. Another feature introduced here is image-based lighting, meaning that you can use HDR images as your light source, making objects appear as though they naturally belong to the scene.

AI-powered roto brush

Another announced improvement to After Effects, which may save VFX artists hours of tedious rotoscoping work, is the enhanced roto brush, which uses a deep-learning model trained on frame-by-frame manual rotoscoping (made by humans, of course). Developers promise that this feature will also do a much better job when it comes to hard-to-roto objects, like hair, overlapping limbs, or transparent elements. In the following demonstration, you can see how the AI brush works:

Comparison viewer in Frame.io

Frame.io has also undergone several iterations building up to the IBC show. Firstly, Adobe refreshed their review and approval tools for creators who work with a wide range of assets and need to compare them. Now, the comparison viewer in Frame.io supports viewing two video, audio, photo, or design files, and even PDF assets side-by-side. That way, you can compare and comment not only on the different versions of one particular video but also choose to view custom-selected files.

Expanded Camera-to-cloud connections

Camera-to-cloud connections allow video teams to transfer their footage to Frame.io directly after each take. This feature is already supported on over 200+ camera systems, and in this release, Adobe announced five additional ways to connect your production to the cloud, such as:

• ProRes RAW and 10bit 4K workflows with Atomos Ninja and Ninja Ultra.
• 102MP RAW photography + 8K video with Fujifilm GFX-100ii.
• C2C with any video camera on the Accsoon Seemo and Seemo Pro.

If you want to read more specifically about Frame.io updates, head over to their blog.

Other Adobe updates for filmmakers

Of course, these are only the major updates that Adobe prepared for their users this fall. Among other announcements and improvements are Premiere Pro’s timeline performance, which is five times faster, a brand-new color settings panel with 3 new automatic tone mapping methods, Frame.io storage connect, a high-performance GPU-accelerated engine in After Effects, and so on. To see the full list, please check out the official Adobe blog. All of the features mentioned are already available in beta, so you can try them out yourself. There is no exact date when they will be generally launched, but the company promises to release them later this fall.

What do you think about Adobe’s updates for filmmakers? Anything in particular you want to test right away? Which feature or improvement is still missing, in your opinion? We would be delighted to read your opinions in the comment section below.

Feature images source: Adobe