What's New in Adobe Premiere Pro? September 2020 Update Overview

Pumpkin Spice Lattes, changing leaves, Fall is here! It’s also that time of year where Adobe introduces new updates to their software.  The upcoming Premiere Pro updates are what Adobe is calling “Streamlined Workflow” updates, which are designed to help speed up our workflow and give you better performance. In today’s blog you can read about these updates and get pumped for the enhanced workflow experience ahead!

Quick Export

An efficient update that is available now in public beta is Quick Export. Anyone with Adobe Creative Cloud can download the public beta and use this feature. Just go to the Creative Cloud desktop app, then go to the “Beta app” categories and install the PR version that is white and blue. 

Once you update the beta and open it up, you’ll see a quick export button in the upper right that allows for quick export of common H.264 formats. If you’re exporting for social media and YouTube regularly, then this will work great. Again, this is just a minor update, however it’s another option to  quickly export.

Scene Edit Detection

Another update is called Scene Edit Detection. Basically it allows editors to quickly find cuts in previously edited video sequences in a fast and precise manner. Adobe Premiere uses Adobe Senesi AI tech to make this happen and currently achieves an accuracy rate of 99%. This update can be useful if someone sends you a fully rendered clip to color grade or add additional graphics to. 

For example, let’s say you have a fully rendered clip that does not have any cut points. With this Adobe update, you would be able to right click and select “Scene Edit Detection.”  After you hit analyze, Adobe Premiere would use Adobe Sensei to detect and place a cut at each cut point. With these newly cut clips, you can make adjustments to color or use auto-reframe to reframe the cuts in social square or vertical videos. It’s also possible to take those subclips and organize them in a new bin in order to reuse in new sequences. If you use markers regularly, there is also an option to add markers at each cut point. 

Overall, this is by far one of the most useful new features in the update as it makes the process of cutting up a fully rendered clip very fast and produces clips that can be extremely useful.

HDR For Broadcasters

The next update is for HDR broadcast editors, so if you’re in the editing broadcast world, these updates will surely be exciting. If you do not edit with Apple ProRes or Sony XAVC_I video codecs and do not need to edit in HDR, then you can skip this update, but if you’re interested in learning what it can do, read on.  

Essentially, the update allows users to edit color in Rec2100 HLG HDR for modern HDR broadcasting. HDR in Premiere Pro is the ability to capture and display a wide range of color and light in your video. This gives you the ability to make much more realistic and lifelike imagery that is closer to the human eye. As previously mentioned, the two main codecs that are supported in Premiere Pro for HDR editing are Sony XAVC-I in a .mxf wrapper and Apple PRORES in a .mov wrapper. 

To dive a little deeper, let’s say you’re making a sequence from one of your HLG clips. If you go to the sequence settings, you can view the setups for color space. With this update, you will see that the Rec 2100 HLG color space has been added. HLG stands for Hybrid Log Gamma, and it’s a type of HDR used widely within the broadcast editing community, especially for sports. When mixing color spaces such as Rec 709 footage with Rec 2100 HLG, Premiere will automatically transform the color. So if you drop a Rec 709 standard clip into a Rec 2100 HLG sequence it will automatically transform the Rec 709 into 2100 HLG for you.

Faster VST3 Scanning

In previous Premiere Gal videos you may have heard references to different audio editing plugins  such as Alex Audio Butler, an ai tech that auto-mixes your sound, and Accusonus ERA Bundle, which is a repair tool for audio. 

If you have VST3 audio plugins, when you first launch Premiere Pro, it can cause the software to take longer to open because it’s scanning for these effects when you start.  With the Premiere update for VST3 scanning, the process is now 15x faster to open on a Mac and 10x faster on Windows.  This is great because you don’t want the start speed of Premiere Pro to lag because of your plugins.

ProRes Multicam Performance

Multicamera sequences is a feature in Premiere Pro that enables you to edit multiple angles seamlessly in one sequence as well as make cuts and change the angle at any time using multicamera view. If you shoot in ProRes format, essentially this new update allows  multi-cam with ProRes clips to now perform 2x better, which means less delays in editing.

Overall, when reviewing the updates in store for Fall 2020,  it’s great to see that the Premiere Pro Team is working on performance updates to improve the speed and function within Premiere Pro. As a video editing community, we are always looking for ways to streamline our process and maximize our tools as much as possible.

That’s it! For now :) Until next time, stay safe and stay creative!