Adobe Premiere Pro Gets More Creative with December Updates

Not to get lost in all the holiday bustle and shuffle, but Adobe just rolled out another major update to Creative Cloud that should turn a few heads for filmmakers and video editors.

This December update for Creative Cloud includes some new features and plenty of updates that are quite focused on their NLE mainstay Premiere Pro, as well as the increasingly-robust Character Animator.

Let’s take a look at these new features and tools for improved performance and better titles, graphics, and animations in these popular Adobe apps.

What's new in Premiere Pro

For any video editors slaving away on any last-minute projects for holiday sales, or for all those editing professionals who have logged off for the year, the next time you boot up you’ll find that these new updates are available.

For Premiere Pro specifically, we’re looking at new hardware accelerations for ProRes on M1 systems, as well as better display optimization and some exciting speech-to-text options.

• 5x faster ProRes on Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max systems
  • New hardware acceleration for Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max systems delivers up to 5x faster performance for 4k and 8K ProRes formats.
  • High-resolution HEVC formats are also faster on all Apple silicon Macs running macOS 12.
  • Display technology optimizations on Windows systems with integrated GPUs will see playback performance improvements ranging from 5 percent to 40 percent across all formats.
  • Color Match is now 30 percent faster, accelerating shot matching workflows, and two more effects are now GPU-accelerated.
• Title and graphics improvements in Premiere Pro
  • Using the new Text panel, first introduced for the Speech to Text and captions workflow, editors can now search all of the titles and graphics in their sequence and perform global Search and Replace along with spell checking.
  • A new universal text engine makes it easy to work with different languages and scripts, even within the same graphic.
  • New shape tools allow editors and creators to add polygons to their graphics with precision controls for sizing and the ability to add and adjust rounded corners. Users who are familiar with the Adobe design tools in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator will feel right at home. 

What's new in Character Animator

Similarly, Adobe’s Character Animator is getting several updates. As we’ve covered in the past, this app has grown in popularity and functionality over the past few years to add some fun (and increasingly sophisticated) animated characters to your projects.

These newest updates look to turn up the creativity a bit in terms of more creator tools and some nifty new transcript-based lip syncing capabilities.

Here is the full list of updates for Adobe Character Animator:

• Puppet Maker in Character Animator
  • Puppet Maker gives creators the tools they need to create, customize, and animate their own characters in Adobe Character Animator. Previously, users had to first build and rig a layered puppet in Photoshop or Illustrator, or use one of the pre-built puppets in Character Animator.
  • Puppet Maker gives users the immediacy of starting in Character Animator and the freedom to design their own character from a variety of styles, without leaving the application.
• Transcript-based Lip Sync in Character Animator
  • Also new in Character Animator, Transcript-based Lip Sync allows creators to animate their character’s mouth movements using written scripts or transcriptions, including transcripts generated with Speech to Text in Premiere Pro.

How do you feel about these new Adobe updates? Any excitement or interest in trying these new features out?

Let us know in the comments below!