Adobe is showing the latest incremental update of its Creative Cloud video and audio tools at the IBC Show 2016 in Amsterdam from September 9-13. Following a major release just a few months ago, Adobe plans to sneak peek their latest in post-production collaboration, VR, 3D, motion graphics, and character animation for creating content across multiple screens. Here’s a roundup of summary info, links to more, and videos from Adobe and 3rd party reviewers & trainers. There should be much more coming in the next few months with the actual release of the software.
Below are Adobe intro videos and outlines of feature highlights of this release, which is themed “Connected Creativity.” There’s sometimes additional info linked in Adobe Help, for example Adobe Premiere Pro Help / New features summary. We’ll be adding video or 3rd-party resources to this roundup as they pop up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxThlB_BpXM
Also, a YouTube Live Event with marketeer Jason Levine is planned for September 7 from 8-9 am PT.
Team Projects: Collaboration for Connected Teams
- Adobe will show an interesting new hosted collaboration service, Team Projects, to address challenges of working with other editors and designers across multiple projects and tools. Built on Adobe Anywhere technology — and hopefully more accessible — Team Projects integrates deep collaboration features such as version control and smart conflict resolution, and allows editors and motion graphics artists to work simultaneously within Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, and Adobe Prelude CC. Post-production professionals can work simultaneously in shared sequences, or compositions within Creative Cloud apps, with access version control features that will reduce project conflicts and make reverting to older project iterations simple. The data in Team Projects will be securely hosted in the cloud, and media files referenced by Team Projects can be locally stored source files or shared lightweight proxies. We’ll have to wait on Adobe for more on system requirements, pricing, and other details.
https://youtu.be/seiELRqeYBs
Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder (more at team blog and Premiere Pro Help)
- Here’s the Adobe overview video. Noted in the video is new VR features, building on enhancements launched earlier this year. Additional innovations in the next release of Premiere Pro CC, including auto-aware VR that seamlessly detects and applies the correct setting to stereoscopic and monoscopic media. Capabilities in Adobe Primetime (more at bottom) allow media companies to more easily capture the full potential of VR by building sustainable businesses and delivering premium viewing experiences. These include video playback support, dynamic ad insertion and content protection via Adobe’s Virtual Reality Digital Rights Management (VRDRM).
https://youtu.be/TGNzixH1toY?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
- Improvements to Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects should make working with both applications more streamlined.
https://youtu.be/BTeriE-Jsxo?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
- Better Captions and subtitles in Premiere Pro CC lets users easily create and fine-tune captions to enliven silent auto-play video previews on Facebook for higher engagement, target different languages or improve accessibility for hearing impaired viewers.
https://youtu.be/mXd4tG0egRA?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
- Destination Publishing to render and share video to Behance, the world’s largest creative community, is now possible along with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
https://youtu.be/iOZrmFcnS6k?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
- New visual keyboard shortcut mapping makes it easy to discover, adjust and customize keyboard shortcuts.
https://youtu.be/jvFLVThHoaQ?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
- Improved Live Text Templates allow for simple manipulation of text layers directly inside the Effect Control Panel. Automatically sync missing Typekit fonts, eliminating the need to find fonts manually, and take advantage of a new file format that allows you to share Live Text Templates via Creative Cloud Folders and import them directly into Premiere Pro without requiring an After Effects license.
- Additional File Format Support in the next version of Premiere Pro includes Native QT DNxHD / DNxHR export.
- More Audio Effects, providing higher quality sound processing and improved fidelity from Adobe Audition include: Adaptive Noise Reduction, Dynamics Processing, Parametric Equalizer, Automatic Click Remover, Studio Reverb. New hi-DPI aware effects include, Analog Delay, Chorus/Flanger, DeHummer, Guitar Suite, Phaser, Single Band Compressor, Tube Modeled Compressor, Vocal Enhancer and Multi Band Compressor. Some legacy Premiere Pro audio plug-ins will be deprecated and they will be removed in a future version.
- Refined Lumetri Color tools now provide HDR10 metadata support for editing and delivering HDR10 for new HDR-enabled TVs and displays, plus expanded support for color space metadata, providing greater precision for delivering brilliant imagery.
- Additional features include the ability to render sequences faster with new GPU-accelerated effects and improved support for Apple Metal.
- Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder now offer stitching of multiple clips from camera media into a single file on ingest for easier file management.
- Use the new Global FX Mute button in the Program Monitor to toggle on/off all video effects in a sequence, to improve playback performance, or view the clips without any effects applied.
- A new launch screen offers beginners a variety of learning options and approaches—whether it is examining a completed sequence, how to optimize a project, or a step by step through a featured tutorial.
Improved speed in tracking, stabilization, and rendering is left for future releases, leaving bragging rights for Final Cut users.
As a reminder of what came new just last June, here are a few overview videos. Josh at Retooled.net had a nice take on that release, covering some handy smaller features and notes on newly “obsolete” effects. And Adobe’s Dave Helmly added a complete demo, Adobe Premiere Pro CC June 2016 Update (v2015.3).
https://youtu.be/3JVDMt3lPlo
https://youtu.be/Y9EJjqVV41o
After Effects (13.x) (more at team blog and Help)
- The new video preview architecture in After Effects is getting further improvements, to let you play raw footage in real-time and eliminate the need to cache before previewing footage. Interactive performance optimizations and new GPU-accelerated effects, such as Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast, can help remove bottlenecks.
- Shared Templates are getting attention. You can create new projects from your own After Effects template and automatically set color management settings and project structure to ensure consistency. Share templates via Creative Cloud Folders to ensure team members and freelancers are working from the same framework.
- In addition to Dynamic Link improvements noted above, other new features include automatic syncing of Typekit fonts from your After Effects compositions. The ability to keep track of multiple outputs from the same file over the life of a project by adding date and time tokens to your file name output template. Marker and scripting improvements helps users fine-tune compositing details. A 360-degree preset gives users a better viewing of monoscopic equirectangular video. Optimized time remapping, combined with faster Dynamic Link, improves overall workflow efficiency, saving more valuable time for users.
- A new 3D renderer from Cinema 4D sounds promising. Adobe says that you can quickly and easily create 3D text and logos without leaving After Effects. You can bend planes and extrude 3D text and shapes directly inside the timeline, backed by the power of Cinema 4D’s standard renderer. If you’re new to 3D, they’ve made it easier to jump in: control quality and render settings with a single slider, and work with the same camera, lighting and text animation tools you know already.
https://youtu.be/WtnATspegEY?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
Info on many smaller improvements and bug fixes should be forthcoming on the team blog after the release. At the June release, there was at least one known bug for users of After Effects Text Templates, according to Joost van der Hoeven. Other reports include problems with missing LUTs & syncing, and sudden hard rebooting of a Hackintosh (regular Macs can use the OS X default display driver, not the recent Nvidia one, if they experience this).
Motionworks looked at the April NAB preview of this release several months ago, AE CC 13.5, in After Effects 3D Enhancements. Otherwise, all the usual AE heavyweights and usual suspects did not report on the June release.
Character Animator (see more at team blog and Help)
- The next version of Character Animator CC (Beta) should give you Faster Puppet Creation. When combining puppet parts created from multiple Photoshop and Illustrator files, Character Animator would allow you to “mash-up” different body parts to create multiple puppets fast. Recording options have been streamlined to include grouped keyboard trigger recordings with more precise editing options. You should be able to make changes to your puppets faster with enhanced round-trip functionality between Photoshop and Illustrator, and share files easily via Creative Cloud Folders. New users will be able to learn Character Animator quickly with a new interactive getting started tutorial.
https://youtu.be/hSVCWWwPt6o?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
Audition CC (9.x) (see more at the team blog and in Help)
- Users who are new to Audition will find new guided walkthroughs of common tasks, such as reducing background noise, mixing audio elements, or producing a simple podcast. The new on-boarding experience empowers newcomers to get started and feel successful from first launch. In that vein, Adobe is offering a top 5 overview of reasons to use Audition. It’s a mature app in its way, but could use more powerful filters that could be licensed from 3rd parties (better noise reduction please).
https://youtu.be/HuTXhuao480?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUEXQZcrvlZc2kygJuR_0n5
Adobe Primetime and Adobe Analytics (Primetime blog)
In a nod to “TV Everywhere” Adobe also announced new capabilities in Adobe Primetime that will help deliver premium experiences across connected devices that are personalized and effectively monetized with buffer-free content. As an industry-first, Adobe is introducing live-linear ad replacement across every screen. As the scale and demands for streaming become increasingly larger, media companies can now seamlessly replace broadcast TV commercials with dynamically targeted ads. Data points ranging from device type and audience behavioral characteristics to Nielsen segments and psychographic data can all be leveraged so audiences are get relevant, personalized ads.
The new dynamic ad insertion capabilities deliver on a hybrid approach of both server-side (in the cloud) and client-side (across devices) ad insertion for live and on-demand streaming. When there are millions of people tuning in to an event, ad insertion becomes a huge technological hurdle; this approach should help to prevent hiccups and generate higher CPMs.
Integrating Adobe Primetime with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics offers video analytics with video stream measurement used by most of the top providers. There’s some interesting background on this at AdExchanger, which mentions dynamic ad insertion for live, linear TV streams well as VOD and OTT devices.