Some people wish they could have skipped 2016 altogether, so Adobe did, going straight from CC 2015 to CC 2017 with the newest revision of Creative Cloud, out this week. Many of the features were first discussed back at IBC in September, but they are now live for the public, and their release comes with the beta release of a Social Publishing Panel that should solve some social media headaches.

This revision focuses heavily on making VR integration and creation as easy as possible in Premiere, and adds a new set of 3D modeling tools to After Effects. There are also refinements in the user interface, with revised icons and an easier tool for editing shortcuts, which should make it easier than ever before to customize the interface. For enterprise Creative Cloud clients, there is the new Team Projects feature. This shares media on the cloud for a variety of editors to work on simultaneously, which could potentially move in on Avid's dominance of multi-editor projects.


Team-project4_0Adobe Team ProjectCredit: Adobe

Premiere has integrated a new set of controls for dealing with HDR video that should be interesting for those moving into the format. As more monitors are capable of displaying high dynamic range imagery, it's rapidly becoming a delivery spec that filmmakers should have a handle on, and it is good to see the capabilities being built straight into Premiere.

Hdr_specularPremiere HDR controlCredit: Adobe

This release also comes with a new beta set of social tools that are currently invite-only, with plans to go wide. For now, paid Creative Cloud members can apply for an invitation here. This toolset offers the ability to manage thumbnails, metadata, keywords, and tracking directly from the Social Publishing Panel, making it easy for filmmakers to maintain consistency and quality as they post across a variety of social networks.

The  Strategic Recommendations for Peak Performance analyzes how your work performs on social networks and uses that history to make recommendations for future timing.

One interesting feature of the social tools is Strategic Recommendations for Peak Performance, which will analyze how your work performs on social networks and use that history to make recommendations for future timing and metadata decisions that might help your future posts perform better. While this will be somewhat useful, especially in helping you identify what time of day or day of the week is the best for your particular audience (and schedule your posts to go live at these times in advance), the social landscape is constantly evolving and it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise when analyzing why a previous video had good engagement. Maybe it was the time of day or your keyword choice, or maybe it was just a great video with compelling, dramatic content.

The recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt, but having a single panel that allows for pretty sophisticated control across platforms is pretty cool, and a great indicator of the future of where video post is going. Even if you aren't a social media celebrity, social is increasingly part of the audience engagement element for every filmmaker, and making it easier to release deleted scenes, BTS videos, or other promotional materials while you are working will be useful to a lot of people.

As always, Adobe projects don't travel backwards in time very well. If you are collaborating with a team, and are not an enterprise client using Team Projects but just a normal filmmaker sharing a hard drive and project files, make sure everyone upgrades at once. Otherwise, handing projects back and forth to team members won't work. You'll be asked to update the project file to a new version when opening it in CC 2017, and it won't open in CC 2015. While the upgrade is free as part of the subscription, your collaborator might have a good reason (like system compatibility) to be waiting to upgrade. If you're a solo auteurs, however, there should be no reason to hold off on your upgrade.