There is some big news that you should be excited about regarding Premiere Pro and After Effects CC 2019. Let’s have an overview of the new features that affect video editors.
This is first of five articles about the new release of Premiere Pro and After Effects for video editors. To be perfectly clear. I mention only these After Effects features that affect video editors, but there are more you may be interested in if you're more into motion graphics and visual effects. In the following articles, we'll cover:
- Selective Color Grading with new Curves in Lumetri Color
- Using Spreadsheets and Custom Fonts with Motion Graphics Templates
- Intelligent Audio Cleanup
- Good practices for upgrading your Adobe software
No more time to waste! Let's check out the new features below:
To wrap up, these are points discussed in the video:
1. Better performance and faster rendering
Adobe implemented hardware-based encoding and decoding for H.264 and HEVC. It should mean better performance and faster rendering for these codecs. They also claim that Lumetri Color performance will be better as well. Let's just hope that these improvements will be noticeable in real life.
2. New Curves
This is a very exciting update for both Premiere Pro and After Effects. Adobe calls it the Selective Color Grading tool. Basically, these are curves that will make a color grading process much faster and easier. Innovative second axis shows you precisely what you’re going to accomplish with your curve modification (which makes it really easy to use).
There are five curves overall, though the first one was already in Lumetri Color previously, only with a different visual representation (it was this color circle you may have used). Thanks to the curves changing, for example, saturation in shadows in the shot will be easier than ever.
3. Improved Invitation Workflow in Team Projects
A small update for team projects makes the invitation process faster. You can now group your collaborators for more efficiency. You could, for example, invite the whole editing department with just a single click of a button!
4. Data-driven infographics
You can feed your motion graphics templates from a spreadsheet, giving you a lot of new possibilities and potentially saving you a load of time. You can drag and drop a spreadsheet file and circle between rows of the database. This feature requires the template to be prepared in After Effects but it's not clear how to do this at this point. There will probably be a documentation in a few days. It's a really powerful feature. Does it sound like a big time saver for you? Let us know in the comments section.
5. Audio Cleanup
There are two updated sliders in the Essential Sound panel. Reduce Reverb slider is completely new while Reduce Noise is updated from the previous version. Adobe claims that these are intelligent filters that should give you good results despite their simplicity.
6. Timecode shortcut entry
Now it's time to talk about new updates that confused me a little bit. The company says in its release documents that you can use a shortcut for timecode entry, but when I search for timecode in the keyboard shortcuts panel, there’s no such option. It could be a fault of the pre-release version I was working on but I may have misunderstood something as well. If I find out what’s going on, I’ll post a comment below explaining how it really works.
7. Display Color Management
You can finally enable Display Color Management. To do it, you need to go to General Preferences and there will be a checkbox at the bottom that you need to click. You can automatically adjust the color space for different displays, including P3, rec709, and rec2020 displays. This is a really big deal! Many users would say Premiere Pro and After Effects should have had this feature a long time ago, and now it's finally here.
8. VR (spatial markers, theatre mode)
I don’t have experience editing VR footage, so I’m not sure how these work, but you can now add Spatial Markers to mark a specific point in a space that needs to be changed or modified. This is quite a nice feature that could be useful in a regular video as well.
The other new feature for VR editors is a Theatre Mode and, if I understand correctly, you can now screen the results of your work within Adobe Immersive Environment to collaborate with other members of your team. Feel free to clarify if you know more about this feature.
9. New native format support
Premiere Pro will support the footage from Arri Alexa LF, Sony Venice v2, as well as HEIF/HEIC capture format used by iPhone 8 and iPhone X.
10. Consolidate Duplicates
If you go to the Edit menu, there is a new feature called Consolidate Duplicates that will help you clean up the project. It’s just under the Remove Unused option and should be a great complementary to it.
Now about some After Effects updates.
11. Font Controls [AE]
Motion Graphics Templates workflow now has the ability to use different fonts in a single template. This way, you can really tailor it for your needs and for your brand. Greatly appreciated!
12. Parameter Grouping [AE]
Grouping parameters will allow building complicated motion graphics templates that are still easy to use by editors in Premiere Pro. It's a small improvement that makes so much sense. By the way, in my opinion, organization and grouping features are always welcome, as they certainly pay off down the road.
13. Create a protected region [AE]
You can now create protected regions from the work area or from a marker in After Effects composition. This means that when you change its duration, these regions will be untouched. They will also be automatically implemented in Premiere Pro after you export the project as Motion Graphic Template. Also, you’re not restricted to the beginning and end of an animation. You can protect the regions in the middle as well.
14. Adobe Stock - updated search filters
This is another minor update but it can actually be very useful. You can now filter Adobe Stock assets based on frames per second and on the duration of the footage. This way, you will drill down the results to the ones that really match what you're looking for.
Also, it’s worth remembering that you can find Motion Graphic Templates on Adobe Stock directly in Essential Graphics Panel (although this feature is available in Premiere Pro CC for a while).
What do you think about the new release of Creative Cloud for video editors? Comment down below which one of these new features seems to be the best.
