By Brady Betzel

Adobe Creative Cloud July 2021 has a few very intriguing updates. Before I jump into what is updated in Premiere, let’s touch on the After Effects beta. As of July 20, it now contains support for multi-frame rendering, which provides much faster processing power. Adobe is still in the process of porting over many of the effects that embrace the power of multi-frame rendering, as well as many third-party effects plugins. One of my favorite After Effects updates is the Render Queue Notification via the Creative Cloud app. Remember the old “Render Coffee or Smoke Break?” Imagine that but with very precise timing.

In addition to After Effects updates, there is a new Blender plugin for Substance 3D and Mixamo auto-control rig. The addition of an open-source (and free) app like Blender is an interesting direction for Adobe. I hope it continues. Additionally, Premiere Pro and Character Animator are now shipping with native Apple M1-powered Mac support. Now let’s talk more about Premiere…

Premiere: Transcriptions and Captions
Since I mainly work in video, the Premiere Pro July 2021 transcription and captioning updates are what grabbed most of my attention. First, credit where credit is due — I cynically thought that Adobe would release alternate pricing for users of the Sensei-backed transcription workflow, but to my surprise, it is 100% free for Creative Cloud subscribers. Nice.

Adobe is appropriately calling this update “Speech to Text,” and it is fast. Essentially, the latest Premiere Pro update has added the ability to transcribe video and audio clips via the Creative Cloud. And for those wondering, yes, it uploads your audio to a server for processing.

For Avid Media Composer users, one of their issues with Premiere Pro was the lack of a “ScriptSync” equivalent. With Speech to Text, Adobe has jumped the line by natively including this feature. Not only can you use a similar workflow for editing by searching transcriptions for specific words or speakers, but you no longer need to use third-party transcriptions — it is all built into Premiere. This is a very big deal. Many users will see this and say, “Cool, I can add captions to my videos when I upload to YouTube or another service, which will in turn improve accessibility and search engine optimization.” But for editors who must scour many hours of interviews, including transcriptions of clips, this is a godsend — most importantly because it is natively supported inside of the Premiere Pro interface.

I tested the transcription/captioning workflow to see for myself if it really worked, and it did. I was very impressed. I had a 44-minute-long clip with multiple speakers that I wanted to transcribe (and possibly edit, if Adobe Sensei misinterpreted any speech). First, I didn’t find any errors, which is kind of nuts considering the clip I transcribed featured a unique bird species. Second, it took under 15 minutes to upload the audio, transcribe and place the text in my timeline. Amazing.

Because the system I learned when I first started my career was Media Composer, I had to try porting a script over to Avid. It was also easy. There is a drop-down menu to export a TXT or SRT file. I downloaded the TXT file, imported it as a script into Media Composer, ran ScriptSync and bam! It worked. Now there are a few things to keep in mind: You may want to edit the numbers on the side of the script if they bother you and take a look at Avid’s ScriptSync workflow. But overall, using Premiere Pro as a transcription service is a valuable tool. I’m sure someone will make a script to format properly at some point, but it works right out of the box. It’s probably not what Adobe had hoped for, but if you use multiple editing systems, this is a great tool to have.

Final Thoughts
In the end, Adobe is making huge strides with After Effects, Character Animator, the new Substance 3D collection and Premiere Pro. Smaller updates to the Premiere Pro beta, like the updated vectorscope, could easily be overlooked in favor of larger ones like Speech to Text, but they deserve a look as well.

Speech to Text is a tremendous tool for transcriptions, captions and general accessibility for everyone from broadcast video editors to content creators wanting to add subtitles to their videos.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and Uninterrupted: The Shop . He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.