IBC 2018: Adobe Announces New Premiere Pro CC Updates
This year at IBC 2018 Adobe announced a variety of new updates to help video editors streamline their creative workflow. The slogan for this upcoming Premiere Pro CC release is “storytelling with smarter tools.” The idea is that the new updates to motion graphics, color, sound, VR and playback performance will enable you to edit faster and create better content.
So what exactly are these new smart updates that will help us edit faster?
The new software releases will be available in fall of 2018.
New Motion Graphics Workflows
NEW UI GROUPINGS
In the next release of Premiere Pro you will see a new streamlined interface of the Essential Graphics Panel. When you import motion graphics templates (.mogrts) you will see a new “show or hide group” interface. Right now, you have to continually scroll up and down to access and update your motion graphics parameters. I can already see that these new groupings will make it far easier to expand or close of sections and will ultimately help us edit faster.
FONT CONTROLS
Alas, there are now new font controls for Motion Graphics Templates (.mogrt) designed in After Effects!
If you want to see how you currently change the fonts in mogrts, watch this video, and you will see why having a new font control in the Essential Graphics Panel is a much needed asset for editors.
A LITTLE MOGRT HISTORY
The .mogrt workflow between After Effects and Premiere Pro was created in April 2017 to give motion designers an easy way to send off editable versions of their motion designs to their editors. This workflow was preceded by live text templates, which only enabled text edits. So in turn, the .mogrt workflow allows editors to make basic updates to the designs themselves without having to request revisions from the motion designer. Color, size, and content updates can all be controlled by the editor in Premiere’s Essential Graphics Panel — all except, the font. And the reason for this is that .mogrts were designed for teams, who stick the same brand, and the motion designer would use the font for the brand. So there wasn’t a huge need for this (okay maybe there was a need - as clients always want changes, fonts too!), but now there is an even bigger need for font changes more than ever. Why? .MOGRT stock libraries!
Today, it is more common for freelancers, video editors and small video teams to completely skip-out on developing their own custom motion graphics and instead work directly from motion graphics templates to design their own video projects. So with this shift in creation and the proliferation of .mogrts in stock libraries for the everyday video editor, such as Envato Elements, VideoHive, MotionArray and Adobe Stock, it now has became more of a demand for users to be able to change the font easily.
So if you have purchased any .mogrts from stock libraries keep an eye out for updates to your .mogrts this fall!
SPREADSHEET INTEGRATION
Also, lastly, within this new motion graphics workflow are now “data-driven infographics.” Soon, depending on the .mogrt, you will be able to drag and drop spreadsheet files into your Essential Graphics Panel and generate visual representations of your information.
I’m not sure how many people will utilize this tool, but it could be useful for sports programming and broadcast tv which draw from lots of data.
Intelligent Audio Cleanup
Adobe licensed reverb and noise reduction tools from Accusonus to improve and speed up the clean up tools within Premiere Pro’s Essential Sound Panel. You will soon be able to access brand new Reduce Noise and Reduce Reverb sliders in the Essential Sound Panel - these new sliders harness a complex noise reduction technology algorithm, from Accusonus, that professionally and quickly reduce noise and reverb. The results are pretty awesome and you can preview how the Reduce Noise and Reduce Reverb will sound from the Accusonus website.
Accusonus has an entire suite of additional single knob noise reduction and audio improvement tools that currently work in Premiere Pro CC and Audition.
Selective Color Grading
Color is such an important part of your image and Adobe continuously looks to improve the user experience with Lumetri. In Spring this year it released Color Matching and now, you will soon find an expansion to the Hue Saturation “donut.” With the new selective color grading you will be able to emphasize or subdue areas of you image (e.g. skin tones, background separation and nuanced contrasts). The new selective color gradings will be broken into “pairing value” curves:
There are five new curves, all of which have color selection dropper tools:
Hue vs. Sat - Adjust the saturation of any hue (color). Use this to correct and reduce saturation in skin tones.
Hue vs. Hue - Adjust the hue (color) of an existing hue (color) in your video image.
Hue vs. Luma - Adjust the luminance (brightness) of a color. Use this to quickly fine tune your image background separation
Luma vs. Sat - Saturate or desaturate the bright areas of an image to bring back in more detail
Sat vs. Sat - Acts like vibrancy, it will saturate or desaturate saturated areas of your image
End-to-End VR 180
Premiere Pro CC has supported 360˚ video for a couple years now, but they now introduced new support for VR 180. The new support includes 180˚ optimized effect effects for both monoscopic and stereoscopic content. You will also be able to export your finished videos in a Google VR180 format for YouTube.
What is new?
You can view 180 media as equirectangular images in your desktop program window or you can view it with a VR headset using the Adobe Immersive Environment.
Spatial Markers - Will enable you to add markers on your media while reviewing media in your headset so you can easily find those moments when you edit in your video editing timeline.
Theatre Mode - This new mode will create a “virtual screening room” that you can share with your director or producer.
If you are interested in 180 video, I’d recommend these entry level 180˚ cameras:
If you are new 180˚ video I’d recommend watching tutorials from the CreatorUp channel to get well versed.
Performance and Format Support
And lastly, but certainly, not least there are performance boosts! Who doesn’t like better playback?
In the upcoming release there will be better performance and faster rendering for both H.264 and HEVC format (from a press briefing it was noted that this performance boost is for MAC only, but I will follow up with Adobe to confirm). There will also be improved playback and rendering for Lumetri color.
And if you are interested in what new video formats Premiere Pro will support, here is the list:
ARRI Alexa LF (Large Format)
Sony Venice v2
HEIF (HEIC) used by iPhone 8and iPhone X
Improved visibility for Quicktime 32 files so it’s easier to locate legacy media in projects
Concluding Thoughts
So will these new tools help us edit faster and produce more compelling stories? The short answer, yes.
Not only will you be able to edit your .mogrts faster (cough, font controls!), but you will be able to fine tune your color fast and also reduce noise and reverb like never before. And to top it off, there will be an overall performance boost for editing with H.264 video files.
I’m very excited about this upcoming release. Let me know which feature you want a full tutorial demo on once it is released and also let me know what you think in a comment below!