This post was written by Christopher Azar and originally appeared on Adobe blog on June 22, 2021.
For almost 30 years, Adobe Premiere Pro has pushed the envelope of technology to give users the features they need to bring their creative vision to life. Over that time, we’ve seen video change drastically. There are now more platforms, channels, formats, export options, cameras, and inputs than ever before. As video has evolved, we know the way that our customers are using Adobe’s creative tools has evolved too and we must innovate alongside the industry.
For Premiere Pro, that means radically improving the end-to-end experience, not only for people who use the tool day in and day out, but also for the next generation of creators. Our new vision for Premiere Pro starts with refreshed import and export experiences, as well as a streamlined header bar—making workflows easier to learn, more efficient, and more enjoyable. We want Premiere Pro to become a more intuitive, yet powerful editing tool that is ready to meet the demands of tomorrow while also helping today’s creators to meet the demands of delivering high-quality content at quick turnarounds and optimizing content for multiple social platforms.
This interface refresh is a journey that has been a long time coming. It’s a nuanced challenge to take a 30-year-old app and modernize it for new types of video content (like social video which simply didn’t exist when Premiere Pro was first built) while respecting the needs and demands of traditional post-production.
We knew we had to get it right, so we brought together a cross-functional team from product design, research, engineering, and customer experience, who collected data and worked closely with our customers on their wants and needs to ensure the new experience is as beautiful as it is functional.
Inviting creativity through intuitive design
We are a design-led company, and we want our tools to reflect that. This refresh is more than just a facelift, it’s the first step in a longer journey. Our design and engineering teams are working in lock-step to implement purposeful, thoughtful change. We continually and passionately discuss the functionality and intention behind each iteration to ensure we don’t just simplify things for the sake of doing so, but rather create new and improved workflows to enhance the editing process.
The new Import Mode, for example, is now a streamlined, media-first experience that focuses on what social video creators and editors need to do first—access their content quickly and easily. While the ability to simply import through the finder or media browser is still an option for existing users, we removed the need to read through complex and confusing settings dialogs like New Project and New Sequence.
This produces a clear path for creators to start new projects, while also providing a better workflow for experienced editors by allowing them to import media from multiple file paths, preview clips from separate essence files stored in camera folder structures, and make favorite folders.
We’re also introducing a new header bar designed to seamlessly integrate the core phases in the editing process: Import, Edit, and Export. A task-specific workspace dropdown menu and Quick Export are accessible directly through the header. Users can quickly link to check out what’s new in the latest build and provide feedback on the public Beta with the click of a button. This header bar will be a universal design element across the Adobe Creative Cloud applications to support the import/export process and provide more consistency and familiarity as users orient themselves within different tools.
Optimizing the export process
Today’s video creators and editors alike are constantly faced with the challenge of delivering content optimized for multiple social platforms and delivery formats against quick turnaround times. To do this previously in Premiere Pro was complicated and hard to manage without knowing the preferred specs of any given destination. While the majority of Premiere Pro users are often creating content destined for different places, like social media, many aren’t using the social export feature in the app—or even know it’s there to begin with.
With this in mind, we’ve evolved Premiere Pro’s export experience from a format-first approach to a destination-first design.
We’re working on background rendering so users can continue editing while their videos are exporting and stay in their creative process. This improved user experience makes it possible to quickly and efficiently export videos to popular social media platforms, without compromising the flexibility and power more experienced users rely on.
A guiding philosophy behind the refresh is to keep what people love the most about Premiere Pro while adding in what we’ve learned over the years to make it better. Our engineering team has over 60 years of professional editing experience combined and knows how impactful changes can be for our customers who have been using Premiere Pro for years. We’re being judicious with this process because we know a lot of you spend a lot of time in Premiere Pro.
We’ll be rolling out these new experiences on a timeline starting with this public Beta to ensure that our customers can provide feedback, explore the changes, and continue to use Premiere Pro to its fullest potential. These changes are additive and not a replacement to current workflows. We understand how important muscle memory is, and we don’t want to disrupt your flow in any way.
As we mentioned, this is just the beginning. We’re looking holistically at the entire editing experience so that we can build a framework to address the needs of today and anticipate the possibilities of tomorrow. We’re excited to introduce this first step in our new vision for Premiere Pro with more to come this year.
Learn more about the new Import, Export, and header bar in Premiere Pro (public Beta).
This post was written by Christopher Azar and originally appeared on Adobe blog on June 22, 2021.
