What’s New in Adobe video and audio

October 2021 

The latest release of the Adobe Creative Cloud video and audio applications is focused on features, performance, and workflow refinements that help video pros and social storytellers cruise through their creative work. These include Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects, Speech to Text improvements in Premiere Pro, Body Tracker in Character Animator, and more. 

Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Creative Cloud subscribers also have access to Beta versions of the video and audio applications. This allows users to try out additional new features, like Remix in Premiere Pro (Beta) or support for Apple silicon Macs in After Effects (Beta), and share their feedback with our product teams as these features are refined. 

What’s new in After Effects 

After Effects 22.0 delivers on the number one feature request, Multi-Frame Rendering, making everything faster, from Preview to Export, with workflow efficiency features that enable users to optimize performance. 

Faster Previews and Exports with Multi-Frame Rendering 

Multi-Frame Rendering accelerates After Effects by taking advantage of the full power of the user’s CPU cores. After Effects automatically adjusts resource usage to preview and render compositions as fast as possible on the user’s machine, with performance gains up up to 4x faster. 

Speculative Preview 

With Speculative Preview, After Effects 22.0 renders frames in the background when the application is idle. This provides an improved preview experience, enabling users to play back or scrub compositions when they return to working on their project. 

Composition Profiler 

Sometimes complex projects can produce bottlenecks in rendering performance. Composition Profiler provides detailed performance information for a composition, including a comparative breakdown of the render times for all layers, effects, styles, and masks. To access the Composition Profiler, users can click on the snail icon in the lower left window of the Timeline panel. Performance is color coded, allowing users to easily identify elements that can be optimized or temporarily turned off to streamline their workflow.

Reimagined Render Queue 

The reimagined Render Queue takes advantage of Multi-Frame Rendering and highlights what’s rendering, how much time is remaining, rendering progress, and how it is using the system. This information allows the user to monitor render performance and disk space usage. 

Remote Notifications 

When a render queue job, or entire queue is finished rendering, After Effects 22.0 notifies the user via the Creative Cloud Desktop and Creative Cloud mobile app. If the user has a smart watch connected to their mobile device, they can receive the notifications there too. 

Export Faster with Adobe Media Encoder 

With Multi-Frame Rendering, users can now export your compositions with Adobe Media Encoder 22.0 up to 3x faster. This maximizes the the full power of the user’s system, and enables them to continue working in After Effects while Adobe Media Encoder renders their compositions in the background. 

Support for Apple silicon Macs in After Effects (Beta) 

Native support for Apple silicon Macs in After Effects (Beta) provides improved performance on new Macs, including the new MacBook Pro further modernizing the After Effects architecture.

Scene Edit Detection in After Effects (Beta), powered by Adobe Sensei 

Scene Edit Detection, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically identifies edits in a rendered clip and places markers at the cut points or separates the clips into individual layers. This makes it quicker and easier to reuse part of an edited video clip or apply motion graphics and visual effects to specific clips. This feature was first released in Premiere Pro last year and is now in After Effects (Beta).

What’s new in Premiere Pro 

Speech to Text Improvements 

From transcription through final export, Speech to Text in Premiere Pro 22.0 is the industry’s only fully integrated and automated workflow for creating and customizing captions. In this release, Speech to Text offers improved transcription accuracy for pop culture terminology and better formatting of dates and numbers and a new option to export captions as sidecar files only.

Now in Premiere Pro (Beta): Speech to Text on-device 

Speech to Text on-device allows editors and creators to use Speech to Text transcription without an internet connection and provides faster transcriptions. To test on-device Speech to Text in Premiere Pro (Beta), users need to opt-in and download the 650GB language pack. Initially, the language pack will be English-only. The language pack is updated whenever the user updates their Beta build. Premiere Pro (Beta) users have the option to turn off on-device transcription.

Simplify Sequence 

Simplify Sequence is a fast and easy way to create a clean copy of the current sequence for sharing with other editors, archiving, or exporting as an EDL, XML, or AAF. When the timeline is cluttered, Simplify Sequence in Premiere Pro 22.0 allows editors and content creators to remove empty tracks, disable clips with specific labels, and remove markers, or other user-specified elements.

Color workflow improvements in Premiere Pro 

Color gives stories their character and allows editors and content creators to develop their own cinematic style. Building on decades of Adobe color science, the Lumetri tools make color grading an integral part of video editing in Premiere Pro, with advanced controls that are approachable and fast. 

Along with broadcasters and production companies, color workflow improvements in Premiere Pro will be welcomed by creators and editors working with mirrorless cameras like Sony A7Siii, Canon EOS R6, and Panasonic S1, as well as HDR iPhone video. 

Expanded color management 

With new color management for H.264 and HEVC formats, Premiere Pro 22.0 interprets the correct color space when importing these formats, including 10-bit and HDR footage. For exports, Premiere Pro includes the correct color space metadata with output files, ensuring that colors will display correctly on the destination platform. When creating new sequences, editors can choose to Match Source or apply the color space they want to use, based on their working media. 

Color management for Sony XAVC-L-HDR footage gives broadcasters and production teams greater flexibility for working with HDR content. XAVC-L-HDR takes up less server and storage space compared with XAVC Intra.

Lumetri color tool refinements 

The Colorized Vectorscope provides a much richer representation of the color components in your image for more accurate color corrections. Editors can double-click the new Vectorscope for a 2x zoom to make precision adjustments, for example for white balance or skin tones. A new skin tone line in the Vectorscope provides a helpful reference. 

The improved Histogram offers a brighter and crisper display and supports both SDR and HDR content 

Lumetri curve refinements make adjustments more efficient with a more spacious rectangular window and easier selection of adjustment points on Luma and RGB curves.

Improved Bars and Tone 

The bars and tone generator in Premiere Pro can now create test patterns for both HDR (High Dynamic Range) and traditional SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). The audio parameters are now combined into one consolidated dialog. By default, the color space and other technical details like resolution and frame rate will be set to match the currently active sequence. Users can adjust these parameters or use one of the presets, such as UHD Rec.2100 HLG. 

Bars can be used to check display calibration or for troubleshooting. Users can include bars and tone as part of content delivery requirements to ensure image and audio fidelity. 

Auto Tone in Premiere Pro (Beta) 

Auto Tone uses a new technology to apply intelligent color corrections in the Lumetri Color panel. Auto Tone adjustments are reflected in the Lumetri sliders so that users can fine-tune the results or simply use Auto Tone to guide their color work as they become familiar with the Lumetri color correction tools. When it is released, Auto Tone will replace the current Auto adjustment button, providing more sophisticated color correction, with better results, with a single click.

Editing and collaboration improvements 

Improved Media Relinking for Team Projects 

It is now easier to relink media in Team Projects. Editors can now follow the same relink workflow in Team Projects as they do in stand-alone Premiere Pro. Team Projects generates the necessary media mapping – just as it does with the Team Projects Media Management dialog – and keeps track of local media and the shared Team Projects file. 

Restore trim selection 

Editors and content creators can now reset selections that were accidentally unselected. This handy option saves users from manually reassembling a complicated group of selections on the timeline just because they clicked in the wrong place. 

Remix, powered by Adobe Sensei, in Premiere Pro (Beta) 

With the power of Adobe Sensei AI, Remix allows editors and content creators to intelligently re-arrange songs so that the music matches their videos. Instead of painstaking razor cuts and crossfades, Remix does the work, turning hours-long music editing chores into a task that takes seconds. With slider controles, users can create endless variations on a song, enabling users to find the perfect mix quickly.

Improvements for new Import mode in Premiere Pro (Beta) 

Guided by user feedback, the Premiere Pro team continues to make improvements to the new import mode currently in public Beta. These include sorting options, marquee selection for choosing media, keyboard navigation, a playhead for scrubbing thumbnails, the ability to copy files on import, and the option to import both clips and whole folders. Users can also specify Bins (folders) to import files into. 

The Project name is now located at the top of the Import panel, providing a clear starting point for new projects. Users enter a project name right in the title bar. From there, they can continue in the new Import mode or move straight to Edit mode and assemble assets using the Media Browser.

What’s new in Character Animator 

Body Tracker, powered by Adobe Sensei 

With new Body Tracker, powered by Adobe Sensei, Character Animator 22.0 enables creators to use their body movements and gestures to animate their puppets, even if they don’t have experience with animation or keyframing. Move for the camera and your puppet moves along with you.

Now in Character Animator (Beta) 

Puppet Maker allows animators to create their own characters in the application without having to start in Photoshop or Illustrator. Users can choose from a variety of character styles, customize hairstyles, skin tones, accessories, and more, and get animating faster. 

Transcript-based Lip Sync lets creators use transcripts to animate their character’s lip sync with more accurate results and mouth shapes, thanks to Adobe Sensei machine-learning technology.

_{Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Audition, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Sensei, After Effects, Creative Cloud, the Creative Cloud logo, Illustrator, InDesign, Lumetri, and Photoshop, are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.}

_{© 2021 Adobe Inc. All rights reserved.}

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