By Brady Betzel

Adobe has been on fire over the past few years with its Creative Cloud updates, and this latest one is no different. From ARRI Alexa Mini compatibility in After Effects, Premiere Pro and Media Encoder to updates to Team Projects that speed up collaboration, Adobe is not stopping.

Premiere Captions

Adobe Premiere Pro
Over the past six months, Adobe has been focused on its new Captions workflow. In this update they have taken the ease of working, editing and creating your own captions to the next level. As a broadcast and online editor, I’ve always found working with captions annoying. You would always need to buy some expensive software that typically did one thing: insert captions.

Avid Media Composer kind of has a way to adjust captions (if you can figure it out and get it to stick). CineXtools has some decent captioning tools, but it isn’t cheap. And Mac Caption (the gold standard in captioning) costs anywhere from just under $2,000 to under $7,000! The simplicity of Premiere Pro’s captioning workflow really takes the aggravation out of editing, conforming and general use of caption files and caption creation. And when you are ready to export from Premiere Pro, you can either export an accompanying caption file (known as a sidecar file), burn them into the video (always on), or embed them to be enabled by the end user (traditional way they are used). The latest update to Caption editing continues Adobe’s effort not only to make my job easier but also to increase accessibility.

Premiere Captions Export

A lot of people take captioning for granted, including me. Before I had kids, I knew captions were important for the deaf and hard of hearing, but I didn’t realize just how many people turn captions on even if they are not hard of hearing. My 9-year-old son always watches content with captions turned on. I asked him why, and he said it’s because they make it easier for him to understand what is going on. It was a big moment for me, even though I’ve worked with captions my entire career.

One thing I’ve been asking about since last year is the forthcoming speech-to-text feature that is being promoted. I love the idea of being inside of Premiere Pro, uploading a proxy to the transcription gods and getting a transcript in sync by timecode in my project. I really hope this feature is as easy and seamless as it should be once it is released. Unfortunately, as of this writing, Adobe has not released pricing.

After Effects
Between Adobe’s After Effects beta and gold master, there are plenty of updates to talk about. But working in broadcast with many editors is one of those challenges you can’t really understand until you’ve been in it … especially for my assistant editors out there. Many moons ago I was an assistant editor and managed a few reality shows (fine docudramas) that were housed on an Avid Unity. Back then, a Unity had a 50,000-file count limit. One time I hadn’t noticed we were at that limit, and about 20 editors all at once opened their doors and told me nothing was working. I almost died. Luckily, I figured it out quickly and deleted some old Avid Attic files.

After Effects MOGRT

That is always a fun stress story to relive, but the reason I bring it up here is because of the updated Media Replacement in Motion Graphics templates (MOGRTs, pronounced “mogurt” like yogurt). In the latest After Effects update, the After Effects MOGRT creator can essentially add a drop zone for images and videos to be replaced by the end user in Premiere. You can even use pre-comps in After Effects or greenscreened elements. Working with multiple editors trying to standardize graphics packages just got a little easier.

Overall, the update I am most interested in is the multi-frame rendering in After Effects. Through my testing and in talking with others, I’ve discovered that one thing tech nerds are baffled by is the way Premiere Pro and After Effects use multiple cores and GPUs to speed up workflow. Both work, but sometimes it’s hard to decide whether you should have a system with a higher core count or a lower core count but with higher speeds. It seems there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

Multi-Frame Rendering

In the public beta of Adobe After Effects, you can now embrace multi-frame rendering. Multi-frame rendering will spread your render across (hopefully) all of your CPU cores to dramatically speed up renders. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my hands on this beta before the announcement — but Adobe touts the new MFR as increasing render speeds up to three times faster than normal. They are going to be releasing a test project so users can see the difference for themselves. But put simply, a machine with four to six cores/16GB memory will see a 1.2x-1.4x increase; eight to 10 cores/16GB-32GB memory will see a 1.6x-1.75x increase; and 16 to 64 cores/48GB-128GB memory will see a 2x-3x increase. You can find out more info on Adobe’s site.

Final Thoughts
There are many more updates to the Adobe Creative Cloud Video suite in this March 2021 release, including new color filters in Premiere Rush; streamlined Character Animator project files; the ability to copy and paste audio track effects in Premiere Pro; realtime 3D draft preview in After Effects; faster Warp Stabilizer processing in Premiere Pro and After Effects, increasing speeds up to 4x; and many more.

But I really think Adobe’s hard work on captioning is paying off. Whether it is for broadcast or Tiktok, burning in captions seems to be here to stay. In fact, I’d often rather read captions than listen to some videos on my phone. Also, be sure to check out Adobe’s newest style of tutorials and product videos. They have taken an often stale medium and made some exciting creative improvements. I really like the new feel of the videos.

For more information on the latest Adobe Creative Cloud Video March 2021 updates check out Adobe’s site.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and 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.