Adobe Adds VR Editing and Output, Publish-to-Twitter, and a New Playback Engine in Updates to CC Video Apps

At this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, Adobe is announcing updates to their Creative Cloud professional video applications, which include Audition CC, Premiere Pro CC, and After Effects CC. The theme is about immersing yourself in creativity. As you may have guessed already, there is native virtual reality (VR) support being introduced. But the killer features don’t stop there.

Audition

Adobe’s sound editing application, Audition, now has a group of simplified corrective tools called “Essential Sound.” This window allows a novice editor to quickly and easily execute some of the most common audio tweaks without having to hunt around for just the right effect.

Even some of the tools have been renamed in this interface to make it easy to understand their effect. There’s a de-esser (which is already pretty self-explanatory), as well as repair sound (noise removal) and unify loudness (compression or normalize) filters. Even if an amateur ends up “ruining” the audio, it’s non-destructive. This means that a pro can still edit all of the underlying effects to undo what has been changed.

Premiere Pro

As always, Premiere Pro is the star of the show in Adobe’s Creative Cloud pro video applications. The new version features continued support for RED workflows, including the ability to natively edit 8k R3D footage. And to combat lag on older (or even newer) machines, there is an especially useful “proxy” mode now baked into Premiere Pro. This option, found under “ingest settings,” will allow an editor to quickly create lower resolution files for “offline” editing. The higher-res original files can be quickly swapped out by simply toggling a button on and off. This frees up system resources for complex effects or running other intense applications like After Effects.

Speaking of easy on/off buttons, there’s also native support for viewing and editing 360° video for virtual reality applications. Premiere Pro has settings to choose when importing this specialized footage so that the preview displays properly as it will in the final output. Options include the field of view and left/right or top/bottom configuration. Again, there are simple buttons on the Source and Program Monitors to toggle the VR preview on and off. With VR headsets getting onto consumers’ faces all this year from Facebook-owned Oculus to HTC and Sony, now is the time to get on the VR production train.

On the encoding side, publish-to-Twitter is now offered from Premiere Pro export and Adobe Media Encoder. What’s more, AME now supports exporting to VR formats.

After Effects

After Effects is getting an all-new playback engine that it will share with Premiere Pro. Although it doesn’t yet have a flashy name like Mercury, it is touted to be many times faster, resulting in real-time audio sync. This is something that After Effects users have struggled with since the inception of the application, so we can only imagine that it will be happily welcomed.

There’s also a live 3D motion graphics roundtrip workflow with Maxon 4D. Effects added or modified outside of After Effects in Maxon 4D will show up and play back in real time without rendering.

Conclusion

There are many other new features and enhancements that we’ll all surely take notice of when the updates begin rolling out to users this summer. Expect to see improvements in Lumetri effects in Premiere Pro like simplified controls that are more aligned with Lightroom than Speedgrade. These improvements, along with simplifications to Audition, will not only help newbies learn skills; they will also help pros become more efficient.