Adobe brings a raft of enhancements to After Effects and Premiere Pro to help you work faster and more efficiently.
(Image credit: Adobe)
Working with video has just got a whole lot faster and smoother, after Adobe unveiled a whole stack of updates to After Effects and Premiere Pro at NAB 2022. The headline feature, which will dramatically improve the lives of most video creators, is the introduction of Frame.io for Creative Cloud, which brings real-time online collaboration tools to your video workflow.
On top of that, however, there are some exciting new features and upgrades to both After Effects and Premiere Pro, and whether you're a hardened pro or just starting out in video, there's something there to help you wow your clients and thrill your audiences. Read on to discover what's new.
After Effects: M1 power and smart new features
(Image credit: Adobe)
If you're rocking a new M1-powered Mac and you're itching for something to really put it through its paces, you'll be delighted to learn that After Effects now offers native support for Apple silicon. And this means huge increases in speed: it'll launch up to seven times faster than on a previous generation Mac, and it'll render up to twice as fast. You'll also notice that CPU-intensive Adobe Sensei features execute more quickly, and playback's smoother too; if you're lucky enough to own an M1 Ultra Mac, you'll find that EXR decoding is twice as fast and ProRes decoding is up to four times faster than before.
That's a pretty impressive burst of speed, and the latest After Effects can help you work smarter as well as faster. There's a new Adobe Sensei-powered feature that'll be a godsend to anyone working with edited clips, in the form of Scene Edit Detection. It uses the latest AI and machine learning technology to automatically scan a clip and detect scene changes, and it'll create markers at edit points for you, or split them into layers, saving you a whole lot of work trying to identify cut points manually.
(Image credit: Adobe)
There are also some great new features for when you're working in 3D with After Effects' Draft 3D engine. If you've ever found yourself struggling to find 2D and 3D layers that are located outside your frame's edge, the Extended Viewer is here to make your life a lot easier. With it you can view everything that's outside the frame, so that you can navigate 3D space and move layers around a lot more easily. And when you want to concentrate on what's happening in the frame, you can dim or simply hide the area beyond the frame.
And finally, to help you keep your 3D compositions organised there's Binning Indicators for 3D Layers. With this you can easily see which 3D layers render together in the same 3D space, giving you a visual map of how After Effects composites 2D and 3D layers together.
Premiere Pro: redesigned workflows and AI colour correction
(Image credit: Adobe)
For video creators working with Premiere Pro, the big news that core workflows have been redesigned to make them more intuitive and visual, speeding things up for professionals and making it a lot easier for new users to get started.
Import mode now presents you with what really matters when you start a new project: instead of project settings, you'll see your media straight away so that you can quickly gather the files you need and bring them all together for editing.
For faster and easier navigation there's a new header bar, with Import, Edit and Export tabs enabling you to instantly switch between Premiere Pro's main areas, and editing workspaces available via a customisable dropdown menu.
The new Export mode now has smart presets that take the guesswork out of finding the right output format, including presets that make it a cinch to upload media directly to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. For power users there's complete control over output settings, and the option to save your own custom presets.
(Image credit: Adobe)
If you're new to colour correction, or if you're an experienced user who could use a quick colour fix before moving on to making skin tone and sky adjustments yourself, the new Auto Colour tool is here to help you. Powered by Adobe Sensei, it uses AI to automatically generate first-pass colour corrections, enabling novice users to quickly achieve colour consistency, and helping professionals to get straight to the fine-tuning.
There are also performance and workflow improvements to speed your editing process, including the ability to show and hide markers by colour, improved playback looping in trim mode, and a remix progress indicator for when you're working with audio clips. And if you need that little something extra to give your work that final push, you'll find thousands of new Adobe Stock assets available for free, including HD video footage, motion graphics templates and a lot more besides.
Get set up today
Can't wait to get your hands on all these new features? There's no need to wait as they're all available right now. And if you want to get going with a video workflow that can help you work faster and more efficiently than ever before, head straight for Adobe's After Effects and Premiere Pro pages.
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Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
