Adobe continues innovating storytelling with AI | Innovation

The International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) kicked off in Amsterdam this week. The folks at Adobe showed off its latest tinkering and iterative actions devoted to creative artists software. Arguably, the biggest announcements revolve around the world of video creation. Here’s what was shared.

Premiere Pro and After Effects Power Boost

The video editor Premiere Pro continues to gain tighter integration with Adobe’s video effects application, After Effects and its audio editor application, Audition. These three apps are proven tools for creating captivating video and audio.

With regards to AI, Premiere Pro is expected to have improved performance from its “color match” feature. This tool is useful when a video project uses multiple files for one video output, but the files are recorded on different cameras or with different color science. The footage may look great, but the color tones may be mismatched. Basically, one clip has a warmer color tone to it versus the other. The color match computational editing allows you to match the clips with just one click versus going into layers and layers of color editing tools. Also, the overall user interface for the Lumetri Color Panel within Premiere Pro was updated to make color grading and correcting more efficient and user friendly.

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Video is awesome, but it’s even more awesome if its accompanied by top-notch audio. Adobe previously introduced auto ducking of audio tracks within Premiere Pro. This kept you from exporting audio from Adobe Audition to sync with your video footage.

Auto ducking is when a music track overlays a video track with dialogue. During playback, the video editor and/or sound engineer adjusts the gains and fading (ducking) of the music to ensure it does not play over important dialogue. This requires lots of tedious keyframing and synchronizing. Now, this feature is integrated with Premiere Pro and works with only a few clicks.

Building upon the auto ducking tool, Adobe now has “intelligent audio cleanup.” This tool allows for quick editing of audio with noisy artifacts within it as well as removes audio reverb. The machine learning analyzes the audio file and creates great sound with a few sliders and clicks of the mouse. (Figure A).

Figure A

After Effects also now has legitimate NATIVE 3D integration from third-party sources. This means that compositing videos and 3D effects to those composites can be handled within After Effects without hopping in and out of other apps. Better depth perception and analysis, as well as improved GPU acceleration, makes this a much easier tasks for 3D composite video projects and animations.

Creatively display your big data

Hopefully, motion graphics in your videos go beyond the use of lower thirds. It’s pretty easy to create infographics designed for video. In some instances, you may want to create an updated infographic to show changes in previous data.

Why rebuild the whole infographic when you can just create a template? Better yet, why not just import your infographic’s data into your template via a spreadsheet? Having this capability is useful for consistent visual branding standards as well as efficiently displaying new data within the editing workflow. This data-driven motion graphic feature is available in both After Effects and Premiere Pro. I’m not the biggest fan of spreadsheets, but I do respect how useful they are for data uploads and imports. This is another one of those instances.

Asset and template sharing enhancement

With regards to branding, it’s common for video creators to use templates for motion graphics such as lower thirds or video bumpers. This keeps the branding consistent and recognizable. Sometimes the editing process doesn’t always happen on the same computer or hard drive. Being able to access branding assets over the cloud is a huge benefit to the editing workflow.

Adobe introduced motion graphic templates (mogrts) last year, which allowed you to sync files to your Creative Cloud library, or share them with anyone using Premiere Pro or After Effects. This was a great idea, but it had limitations with regards to sizing, font selection, and duration of the template’s playback. Adobe announced more flexibility, which allows all of the above aspects of motion graphics templates to be edited.

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I frequently use mogrts for my video projects, but struggle with sharing these templates with other creators because my branding may not necessarily match up with their branding. Being able to change the typeface alone in these mogrts offers a huge branding advantage. I’m curious to see how luma and alpha mattes are handled in mogrts while being used in Premiere Pro.

Adobe also announced updated features for Character Animator, Audition, and general performance boost for users not running high-end hardware. More details can be found on its blog post. I’m no animator, but I admit that the AI built into Character Animator is rather fascinating with regards to live tracking of facial expressions and characteristics.

I wonder what’s next for Adobe with regards to its Creative Cloud platform. These are some nice updates to announce one month prior to its own software conference. Now I’m really curious to see what we will see at Adobe Max. Stay tuned!

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