Adobe debuts new round of Creative Cloud updates

Premiere Pro and After Effects are amongst the packages receiving a range of new features and M1 support in Adobe’s latest point release.

Following on from the release of the Premiere Pro public beta at the end of June, Adobe is now officially releasing some new features into its Creative-Cloud based post toolsets, with the latest updates covering Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, After Effects, and Character Animator.

The headline feature, at least judging by its position in the press briefing the company gave last week, is Speech to Text as part of the latest Premiere Pro 15.4, and it's hard to argue. Supporting 13 languages at outset, Adobe claims that the new automated software will speed up the time to create captions and transcriptions impressively which, over and above notions off accessibility, given that videos with captions tend to rank higher in SEO results is going to be something that interests a lot of people.

It also gives users a new way to search for individual sequences: double click on a word in the text panel and the playhead will move to the corresponding point in the timeline. Which is all rather useful. Various design tools allows users to create captions in a suitably custom manner. Other new features for Premiere Pro include tetrahedral LUT interpolation for better consistency during the grading tricky scenes, and performance improvements such as faster scene detection, and automatic audio device switching.

M1 support

There is also finally native support in Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, and Character Animator for M1 Macs. This has been rolled out gradually since April across the Adobe range and results in Premiere Pro running editing tasks an impressive 77% faster than on comparable Intel-powered machines, but the upgrade looks like it is still yet to reach After Effects. That is now promised for a public beta later in the year (though, as a sweetener, some of the AE integration features within Premiere Pro such as Motion Graphics templates have been optimised already).

AE itself gets multi-frame rendering, which allows the software to leverage multi-core CPUs for up to 3x faster rendering. In the beta there is also multi-frame rendering for Previews, providing faster on-screen rendering, while the software also features new routines for detecting a lack of general system activity which it will use to then divert more resources into rendering

Over in Character Animator, budding Andy Serki (that has to be the plural or Serkis surely) can now use their own body movements and gestures to animate puppets in a new beta feature, while another beta feature, Puppet Maker, allows for the quick creation of characters without any specific skills required.

All new features are available through the usual range of CC subscriptions at no extra cost.