Adobe sets out to speed up video editing with 5 new Creative Cloud features

 Adobe Max logo.
Adobe Max logo.

Adobe's been holding its annual Adobe Max conference since 2003, and every year it dominates the headlines on creative industry websites like the one you're looking at. But while Adobe makes some of the most popular videography software, these tools don't usually get a lot of attention.

In years gone by, it was always Photoshop that Adobe put most of the emphasis on; nowadays it seems to be focusing more on AI tools aimed at marketers and non-professionals. Either way, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it didn't care too much about videographers.

Yet if you scratch the surface, you'll find that significant updates to its video making tools also tend to get airtime at Adobe Max too: and to help you out, we've listed everything scheduled to be announced in today's opening keynote.

It's fair to say that at this year's Max, the focus is on speeding up video workflows, rather than anything completely revolutionary. Still, we all have deadlines to meet, and we all want to go home at the end of the day, so these new features are still worth checking out...

Five new features for video

Premiere Pro screenshot
Premiere Pro screenshot

We've been excited for a while about Adobe's plan to integrate Frame.io into Premiere Pro and After Effects, which allows videographers to collaborate remote with others on footage, in real-time, even at high resolutions. And it now seems to be gaining a head of steam; hence the debut of 'Share for Review' with Frame.io in both video and audio tools. Premiere Pro will now have a 'Share' button that will now intuitively introduce Premiere users to Frame.io, with the click of a button for faster content sharing and collaboration.

Another big announcement is that Premiere Pro users can now publish videos directly to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. The software now includes new templates that make it easy to set up projects for publishing in the most popular sizes and layouts for social media. In other words, creating, editing and publish shorts and reels directly to social media platforms just got quicker.

This means videographers can create posts, add captions, hashtags, and keywords, and then upload them directly from Premiere Pro. For anyone who doesn't post on social media regularly, you might wonder what the fuss is about. But anyone who does will know just how maddeningly time-consuming a job it is, and will appreciate any time-saving or efficiency Adobe can offer here.

Premiere Pro screenshot
Premiere Pro screenshot

Additional innovations in Premiere Pro include a huge 5x timeline performance advancement for faster and smoother editing, along with new color preferences and improved tone mapping to make it easier to improve the color in your video; a popular request from the Premiere Pro community that Adobe has acted upon.

Video templates

And that's not all. If you're seeking an easy way to create polished video content quickly, you'll be pleased to know Adobe Stock is introducing video templates. The stock library, which is integrated into all of Adobe's Creative Cloud tools, will now add a rich new video template collection that brings together Premiere Pro, After Effects and Motion Graphics templates.

Finally, Adobe will also be announcing new AI-powered text-based editing and motion improvements in Premiere Pro and After Effects. Although right now, that's all we know: Adobe hasn't told us anything more about this… or indeed the other new features we've described above.

To be honest, this is a bit unusual: normally, us journalists get to attend a virtual or real-life press conference in advance of Adobe Max, to see the new features being demoed and ask the experts questions. This year, though, we've seen nothing, and nor have any of our colleagues on sister titles. So basically, we've shared about all there is to share at this point.

If you want to watch along at home, though, and see whether Adobe actually gives more details or shows anything in action, you can register to watch Adobe Max (which starts today) online, at max.adobe.com.