Tutorial: New Features in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019

Editable Motion Graphics Templates

The next feature I want to highlight is editable motion graphics templates. Now, we've kind of already seen this with the data-driven motion graphics template, but this is also a new feature in 2019. Figure 7 (below) shows another one that I downloaded from Adobe Stock and it has a little animation to it. You can see in the video that it has a little slide in and then a little movement on the blue rectangle on the left.

Figure 7. An editable motion graphics template from Adobe Stock

Again, on the Essential Graphics panel (Figure 8 below), when I choose the graphic in my timeline, that immediately changes to what I'm editing. You've got the header text that's set up here by the template creator which can be changed. And then the body text is five different lines. So the first line is set to automatically span two or three lines, and then the second line would be in between, and so on and so forth throughout here. I use the spacing to create different headings or bullet points, but you could of course fill that in, top to bottom with text if you'd like.

Figure 8. Editing the text and graphics in the Essential Graphics panel

And then you can adjust the positioning, left and right and up and down, and then there are three different design styles with this particular template. Basically, those are just changing the colors and positioning. And if you don't like the color, you can change it in the Accent Color field. And of course, you can adjust the text size as well.

Motion graphics templates are getting more and more powerful within Premiere Pro, and it’s making our jobs as editors much easier and much faster because we don't have to be After Effects experts just to do simple things, like good-looking titles.

Vector Motion

The final feature I want to highlight is vector motion. For those of you who have worked in After Effects with vector graphics, you'll know that you have the ability to click a button that turns on Continuously Rasterize, and that means that anytime you have vector graphics in your after effects file, those graphics will act like vector graphics in that they won't lose quality no matter how much you scale them or move them around.

Premiere Pro has traditionally not had that feature. If you wanted that, you had to go into After Effects, do your entire animation and then bring that into Premiere Pro at the right resolution. Those days are behind us, to some extent, but you have to take that with a little grain of salt.

You can see in Figure 9 (below) that I have a graphic that I imported myself. It's an illustrator file. It's all vector data.

Figure 9. My imported graphic, a vector-data Illustrator file

In theory, if I scale this up to 598% using the Vector Motion effect in the Effect Controls for the graphic (Figure 10, below), it will not lose any quality.

Figure 10. The Vector Motion effect in the Effect Controls panel

But you can see in Figure 11 (below), when we increase the scale we've got pixelation all over the place. So, it's not working.

Figure 11. The image, expanded and pixelated

So, here's what I've discovered about this. If you are creating a graphic in Premiere Pro that is a true graphic that you're using in the Essential Graphics panel, then it will work correctly with vector graphics. However, just bringing in a vector file into Premiere Pro does not make it compatible with Vector Motion. It seems like that could possibly be a bug that they will fix in a future update, or it could be that Adobe hasn't quite committed fully to being able to work entire with vector graphics within Premiere Pro. Perhaps they're worried about the cannibalizing After Effects, but honestly we all pay for subscriptions anyway, so you've got all the applications at your disposal.

Either way, although it not perfect, it's certainly makes a difference, because if I do want to create a graphic that's simple, then I can scale it up without any loss of quality.

So, that's three of the newest, best features in Premiere Pro Creative Cloud 2019, and we'll see in the spring what Adobe has next.