Adobe has announced new updates to both Premiere Pro and After Effects. Top among them is Premiere Pro’s new ability to automatically tonemap HDR footage, even iPhone HLG, to match your protect editing space. They say it retains consistent colours and avoids blown out highlights that are beyond the limits of a standard dynamic range project. As well as HDR footage, it also supports log video, including Sony S-Log, Canon C-Log, and Panasonic V-Log.
Other updates to Premiere Pro include sequence locking for offline editing, new language support for its speech-to-text engine, and a new “Reset options” at launch allows you to maintain and clean up your installation, so it continues to run smoothly. After Effects only sees one update, but it’ll be a huge update for some. It now supports OpenColorlO and ACES color management.
Automatic Tone Mapping
The automatic tone mapping feature is designed to allow you to mix and max footage from multiple sources, both standard and high dynamic range, and mix them together seamlessly to fit in a Rec.709 colour space. It supports iPhone HLG, various Log formats (including S-Log, C-Log and V-Log), as well as other HDR formats, such as HLG colour space. It’s enabled by default, although you can disable it if you wish.
Sequence Locking for offline editing
This is designed for those editing in teams for when they need to work without internet access – perhaps on a flight or train journey. Any changes you make to the sequence will be saved locally as a copy of the sequence. These edits can then be checked in and applied once an internet connection becomes available. If two or more users happen to be offline editing on the same sequence, the first person to push their changes has them applied. Other users are warned when they attempt to update that there will be conflicts, but they’ll be able to publish their changes as a new sequence, available to the team.
New language support in Speech to Text
The speech-to-text engine in Premiere Pro is designed to allow you to create subtitles and closed captions. It’s been around for a while and allows you to either bake the subtitles into the video itself or export them as an SRT file for playback in players that support them or uploading to YouTube. The newest update adds a number of new languages to its database, including Norweigian, Swedish and Dutch. You can find out more about downloading language packs here.
Reset options at launch
Being able to reset options on launch isn’t anything new. Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge and a bunch of other Adobe applications have been able to do it for a while now. Premiere Pro’s Reset options panel allows you to perform maintenance and cleanup on Premiere Pro in order to optimise it before launch. The goal is to help things running as quickly and as smoothly as possible as well as to more easily fault find issues, allowing you to empty your caches without having to fully load the application first.
After Effects – OpenColorIO & ACES colour management
OpenColorIO and ACES possibly won’t mean a lot to many people, but for those who need a consistent colour workflow through applications, they’ll often pick ACES colour management. I’m not even going to try to explain how it all works here because it’s outside of the scope of this announcement post. But there are plenty of videos about the ACES workflow over on YouTube and here’s Adobe’s summary of it to give you a quick intro as to why you might care:
After Effects integration with OpenColorIO (OCIO) enables you to work natively with the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) in After Effects.
OpenColorIO (OCIO) is a color management solution used primarily in motion picture production that helps enforce a color management methodology required for high-fidelity color imaging.
The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is a free, open, device-independent color management system that aims to be the filmmaking industry standard for managing color.
Essentially, ACES is the industry standard in Hollywood, and a lot of people have come to adopt a similar workflow in their own work. Their own work might just be personal videos, or uploading to a YouTube channel or maybe you’re a production company serving commercial clients or shooting wedding videos. Whatever it is, shifting over to an accepted industry standard workflow has become more commonplace, especially as cameras that can shoot video have become far more capable and there are a lot more different standards out there. ACES basically unifies them. That’s the idea, anyway.
The new updates for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro are available to download now through the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app. Check the Adobe site to find out more about the updates for both Premiere Pro and After Effects.
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