With IBC just around the corner that must mean it’s time for another update to the Adobe Creative Cloud tools. As usual when a big trade show rolls around these days, Adobe will update their entire suite of video tools with new features across the board. We like to look at Premiere Pro, so let’s do just that.

But Audition first!

One of my favorite things coming to the CC tools is coming to Audition. That is audio ducking. I mention this first as I hope we can pressure Adobe to bring this to Premiere Pro. We need this in Premiere Pro. I mean come on … Avid added this to Media Composer!

And now for Adobe Premiere Pro

Since I really like those little features that will be loved by the craft editors of the world, here’s one: more label colors. Any believe it or not they are normal colors. All labeling preferences have been consolidated under one preference.

Remember that workaround you have to do to delete gaps that might be between clips in the timeline? Not anymore.

One bit of big new here is Multiple Open Projects. Premiere editors have been asking for this forever… like we had in Final Cut Pro 7. Personally, once the Media Browser came along I’ve found the need for multiple open projects to be not so much a need anymore but I can still see it’s usefulness.

Multiple projects is pretty simple in operation. The difference in the file menu is there’s now a few new options like Close All Projects and Save All. If you have multiple open projects then being able to save them all is a good thing.

If you’ve worked with PPro for any length of time you know that when you have media in a timeline then it must have a master clip living in the project. Such you can see when importing a sequence via the Media Browser as it will import master clips as well. The same happens when dragging from one open project to another but there’s an interesting new preference called Automatically Hide Dependent Clips that will hide the master clips when dragging in a sequence from another project. It really helps to keep things tidy. And there’s a couple of others prefs there now as well that look taken from an Import Project dialog box.

Another big thing you’ll hear about this Premiere release is all about collaboration.  You may have heard about this as Hollywood Report posted about this recently and called it, as many will, “bin locking.” I don’t know a ton about Hollywood-style collaboration overall but it isn’t “bin locking” but rather Project Locking. It says it right there in the new Collaboration preference.

The Premiere project structure isn’t the same as Avid Media Composer so by that design it can’t “lock bins” in quite the same way I don’t think. Rather collaboration and project locking are this (from the Adobe press release):

When working with multiple editors or assistants simultaneously on a single project, lock projects to alert others when a project is currently being edited so other users cannot overwrite edits. Assign read-only access to those that need it for viewing purposes only.

This is some good stuff for those editors needing to work together and it’s a natural progression of Team Projects, which will come out of beta. What’s cool about this new collaboration is that editors can work “on premise or remotely” giving some nice flexibility. I wonder how it might work with two editors in different locations who have duplicate media on their own local storage. Editors will have to dig into the new collaboration features to really see how well they work. Team Projects is its own cost above and beyond your standard CC subscription which really is a bummer considering we’re on a subscription here. But it is what it is.

Those are most of the noteworthy features that I saw for the diehard craft editor out there. But they aren’t the only things as there are updates to Motion Graphics templates and a ton of work that has been done with VR editing (remember that Skybox acquisition?) No word that I’ve seen on when these updates will ship (we got the last ones day and date of the NAB announcement but not this time) so keep an eye on your Creative Cloud app.

Here’s the pr points for all of the notable features: