The intelligent choice
Posted on Nov 5, 2023 by Samara Husbands
Now with added AI capabilities as well as total synergy with motion graphics and camera-to-cloud workflows, Adobe Premiere Pro continues to amaze
Advertisement feature
From Academy Award-winning films to YouTube content, Adobe Premiere Pro is firmly established as the go-to solution when it comes to editing your next masterpiece. With seamless integration to other Adobe tools, such as After Effects for incredible motion graphics and Frame.io enabling camera-to-cloud workflows, it’s the most powerful and feature-rich NLE on the market.
With Adobe dominating in most creative sectors – from graphics and publishing to photography – using Premiere Pro for video is the natural choice. Of course, the software has changed and improved hugely over the years.
“Adobe Premiere Pro is the leading video editor application in the market,” states Francis Crossman, senior product manager, Premiere Pro at Adobe. Some portion of that popularity is down to Premiere Pro’s three-point editing system, which lets you set start and end points for your clips, then add them to the timeline to line up with an end point you’ve set. By using stacked ‘pancake’ timelines, you can pull source footage into your rough cuts with fewer clicks.
The latest version boasts new capabilities emerging from AI, opening up a new era of technology that can make a filmmaker’s life easier in valuable ways – such as by adding automatic text captions, or searching through the transcript to quickly identify a piece of important footage.
“There is a text-based editing feature that is powered by AI,” Crossman says. “It uses artificial intelligence to transcribe your source material as it comes in, and you can label different speakers and identify who’s speaking. Using text, you can make edits within a sequence.”
The new text-based editing feature speeds up the creation of rough cuts and means editors can auto-generate a transcript with speech to text, search for dialogue and copy and paste the text to watch a story take shape in the timeline.
“It’s a hugely powerful feature for beginners – but it’s also very useful for professionals who have been editing their entire career, as it simplifies the process of editing dialogue-heavy pieces and makes it easy to find and remove filler words.”
Premiere Pro is packed with other AI features powered by Adobe Sensei technology, including colour match, auto ducking and morph cut. It’s designed to eliminate tedious tasks for editors, allowing them to spend more time being creative.
“These improvements came from direct feedback from our community,” Crossman says. “One thing we’ve really doubled down on over the last few years is really listening to our customers and implementing what they’ve asked for.
“Another bit of AI tech that we’re bringing in is enhanced speech – which is closely linked to dialogue editing. This is a function that fixes up poorly recorded dialogue. An AI-powered machine-learning model senses when there’s a voice and then isolates it, removing background noise.” That can be a real project-saver, as nothing ruins a film like poor audio.
Of course, Premiere Pro comes with powerful colour correction and grading tools. And now, AI can be used to automatically balance colours, use colour wheels and curve controls to adjust all or part of a frame and check results with the built-in video scopes.
“Colour is two parts: art and science,” says Crossman. “There’s an art to making it look nice, but then there’s the actual science of getting it done. We have lots of options throughout the app, so we’ve added a settings panel which aggregates all these hard-to-find settings in one place.”
Getting colour spot on requires editors to account for the colour profile set in camera, the camera used, the colour temperature of the shoot and the required final look.
“Now we’ve brought all this into one panel, it will help creators easily achieve sophisticated colour,” says Crossman.
With an incredible ecosystem of software products and AI capabilities within the new, faster Premiere Pro, it remains the most powerful and reliable non-linear editor.
Originally published in the November/December 2023 issue of Pro Moviemaker.
