Video production enthusiasts were greeted with a nice surprise at this year’s NAB as Adobe announced major upgrades to the CC versions of Premiere Pro and Media Encoder. Offering a more comprehensive (and software integrating) Media Management feature, enhanced Lumetri scopes for more intuitive color correction and now support for VR Video workflows, it looks like Adobe will give its competitors a serious run for their money.
Media Management is a new addition that gives users greater flexibility over the workflow between Premiere and Media Encoder. Not only that, once you’ve selected a specific location to import footage from, you can begin to edit immediately while the media duplicates in the background. Also: support for native formats including 6K and 8K files. But the coolest thing is the ability to automatically generate proxies of your media during ingest; thus clips will appear as full resolution versions of your raw files. This will make it easier to edit RED footage on a portable device without any loss in speed or image quality.
Adobe’s added new features in the Lumetri color panel and Lumetri scopes as well. Say hello to items like HSL Secondaries (a more streamlined way of selecting color ranges within a shot. Check out the video demo after this paragraph), SpeedLooks linear looks and more options for color control surfaces are thrown into to the tool bag as well. All this and support for Rec2020 colorspace should turn Premiere into a killer color grading app.
Finally, for the first time Premiere Pro will offer support for managing and editing VR Video workflows. You can toggle between the standard, Source/Project monitor layout to something a little more, well, virtual reality-ish. You can view a demonstration of how it works in this video:
Adobe Media Encoder will have its fair share of updates as well, which you can catch up on in this second video below. What intrigues us the most is the new Publish to Twitter feature. This will allow for immediate access to the popular social networking platform once your 30 second vid has been fully rendered and exported.
Apparently there are more upgrades on the horizon for Adobe After Effects as well. So stay tuned to the Adorama Learning Channel as we provide more updates during NAB 2016.
