Adobe has announced major updates to Premiere Pro CC and its other video apps, with VR workflows spearheading a new focus on immersive VR and 360 video experiences.
Set for an "early summer" release, the CC platform updates bring new VR capabilities to Adobe's flagship video editor, in the form of a "field of view" mode that allows editors to work with imported spherical stitched video and see what a viewer would see when looking in a given direction.
The new mode will allow users to dynamically switch between monoscopic, stereoscopic and anaglyph frame layouts, freely reposition the viewing angle across 360 degrees while editing, and export video with VR tags so that video players like YouTube automatically recognize it.
Adobe also announced a new workflow that enables editors to begin editing during "ingest" while importing video and audio in the background, as well as new proxy workflows for working with high resolution formats including 8K, HDR and HFR media.
Additionally, Adobe is expanding Premier Pro's Lumetri color correction toolkit, which should give editors finer control when isolating and adjusting specific colors using HSL secondaries. New navigational keyboard shortcuts, an added Twitter export option, and extra captioning and titling features are also part of the forthcoming update.
Many other apps in Adobe's Creative Cloud suite are also set to benefit from the new release. Other feature highlights coming to Adobe CC include:
Media Encoder: A clearer media browser panel is coming to Adobe's standalone encoding app, as well as support for Audition and Character Animator apps.
After Effects CC: The motion graphics and special effects editor is being given a new audio and video preview engine for smoother playback for cached frames, new GPU-accelerated Gaussian Blur and Lumetri Color effects for faster rendering, and new 3D media export options.
Audition CC: A new Essential Sound panel boasts simpler sound mixing and preset saving, while a quick export option lets editors send video projects with finished audio directly to Adobe Media Encoder.
Character Animator CC: A new puppet tag panel enables users to apply multiple motion trigger behaviors to video, track puppets in the field of view and quickly switch between facial profiles.
Adobe Stock CC: Tighter integration with Adobe's suite of apps and a new filtered and tagged search system for quick access to over 50 million images and video clips from within Premiere Pro and After Effects.
The new features were announced by Adobe ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show next week, where it will be previewing the updates to Creative Cloud, which are expected to be made available to subscribers in the coming months.
Adobe offers subscriptions to Creative Cloud for $49.99 a month, while non-subscribers have the option of a free 30-day trial. More information about Adobe video apps and Creative Cloud is available on Adobe's website.
