By Brady Betzel

You know it’s almost fall when when pumpkin spice lattes are  back and Adobe announces its annual updates. At this year’s IBC, Adobe had a variety of updates to its Creative Cloud line of apps. From more info on their new editing platform Project Rush to the addition of Characterizer to Character Animator — there are a lot of updates so I’m going to focus on a select few that I think really stand out.

Project Rush

I use Adobe Premiere quite a lot these days; it’s quick and relatively easy to use and will work with pretty much every codec in the universe. In addition, the Dynamic Link between Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects is an indispensible feature in my world.

With the 2018 fall updates, Adobe Premiere will be closer to a color tool like Blackmagic’s Resolve with the addition of new hue saturation curves in the Lumetri Color toolset. In Resolve these are some of the most important aspects of the color corrector, and I think that will be the same for Premiere. From Hue vs. Sat, which can help isolate a specific color and desaturate it to Hue vs. Luma, which can help add or subtract brightness values from specific hues and hue ranges — these new color correcting tools further Premiere’s venture into true professional color correction. These new curves will also be available inside of After Effects.

After Effects features many updates, but my favorites are the ability to access depth matte data of 3D elements and the addition of the new JavaScript engine for building expressions.

There is one update that runs across both Premiere and After Effects that seems to be a sleeper update. The improvements to motion graphics templates, if implemented correctly, could be a time and creativity saver for both artists and editors.

AI
Adobe, like many other companies, seem to be diving heavily into the “AI” pool, which is amazing, but… with great power comes great responsibility. While I feel this way and realize others might not, sometimes I don’t want all the work done for me. With new features like Auto Lip Sync and Color Match, editors and creators of all kinds should not lose the forest for the trees. I’m not telling people to ignore these features, but asking that they put a few minutes into discovering how the color of a shot was matched, so you can fix something if it goes wrong. You don’t want to be the editor who says, “Premiere did it” and not have a great solution to fix something when it goes wrong.

What Else?
I would love to see Adobe take a stab at digging up the bones of SpeedGrade and integrating that into the Premiere Pro world as a new tab. Call it Lumetri Grade, or whatever? A page with a more traditional colorist layout and clip organization would go a long way.

In the end, there are plenty of other updates to Adobe’s 2018 Creative Cloud apps, and you can read their blog to find out about other updates.