Adobe Creative Cloud IBC 2016 Reveal: Team Projects, Visual Keyboard Shortcut Map, and More

September has arrived, bringing IBC and a host of updates to Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications. At this year’s broadcasting mega-conference in Amsterdam, Adobe has announced their planned year-end updates to their pro video applications: Audition, Prelude, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Team Projects

Starting at a higher level than individual app updates, Adobe announced the new “Team Projects.” These projects are distinct from standard projects in Prelude, Premiere Pro and After Effects in that they allow multiple CC users to work on the same project that is synchronized to Adobe’s cloud (Figure 1, below). This new service will include versioning, history and conflict resolution. If a user tries to open a project currently being worked on, the user will be given a choice on how to proceed.

Figure 1. Team projects in After Effects. Click the image to see it at full size.

When asked for clarification on how this works, Adobe said that metadata and references are stored in the cloud, but all assets are not. This means that the users will each need to have access to the same asset files whenever they want to work on a team project. With that in mind, teams will need to plan to utilize a central, shared location for all their assets if they intend to use this service. The team projects feature can also be useful for single users, allowing them to be more mobile with their workflows while not being tied down to a single workstation.

This service seems promising, and I’m hopeful it will be useful to some users. However, having experienced other similar services in the past that ended up crashing and burning, I’ll be looking very critically at how well this actually holds up in real-world uses.

Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro will have some niche but welcome updates. Open captions (Figure 2, below) can now be created within Premiere Pro and edited directly in the timeline. You can also adjust the in/out points of captions within the clips.

Figure 2. Open captions in Premiere Pro. Click the image to see it at full size.

There’s a new visual keyboard shortcut map (FINALLY!) that gives users an at-a-glance view of what keys are assigned to what function.

The HDR 10-color gamut is now supported natively, and there’s a new auto detect for what VR mode your footage was shot in.

And for those working with titles not created by them, Typekit can now automatically replace missing fonts.

After Effects

In the spring, After Effects was given a whole new engine, speeding up the application’s video playback significantly. The fall update will bring enhancements to this engine, which will yield even faster playback. There’s also multithread CPU support for faster rendering.

Finally, for true 3D graphics work, the Cinema 4D renderer is now built-in to the After Effects composition timeline (Figure 3, below). Rendering outside of the timeline will be a thing of the past, and complex 3D graphics can be viewed without launching the Cinema 4D interface.

Figure 3. The After Effects Cinema 4D renderer. Click the image to see it at full size.

Audition

While Audition did not receive any significant new updates, there is a refined set of workflow guides designed to ease the learning curve for new users. There are step-by-step “wizards” that walk users through common audio tasks such as reducing background noise and mastering the “essential sound panel.”

Figure 4. New wizards in Audition. Click the image to see it at full size.

All of these updates to Adobe’s Creative Cloud pro video applications will be released later in 2016.