Adobe Announces Text-Based Editing for Premiere Pro + New Updates to After Effects and Frame.io

Adobe recently announced updates to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io. While the updates may seem relatively small, there are a few major features that could change the workflows of many editors.

Premiere Pro Updates

Premiere Pro now supports a new kind of editing – text-based editing! This feature was put into beta earlier this year and is now coming to the main branch of Premiere Pro. The automatic transcription feature in Premiere Pro has already been incredibly useful for creating captions or just seeing what you have to work with in an interview. But now, interviews and other speech-based projects can be edited without ever touching the timeline! After you transcribe a clip, you can view that text and highlight a section of it. By pressing the comma key (by default) you can then insert the clip associated with that line of text into your timeline. You will still have access to the full transcript but you will also be able to see a transcript for your new timeline. You can even edit out pauses without using the timeline. Pauses in speech will show up on the transcription as a set of ellipses, which can be selected and deleted. These deletions will be reflected in the timeline. If you do choose to edit something on the timeline, this will be reflected in the transcript. This text-based editing has the potential to greatly speed up the editing process for interviews or talking head videos by creating rough edits in minutes. It is an exciting addition to the existing captions tools. This feature will be available in May 2023.

Additional, Adobe promises that this version of Premiere Pro will be the most stable version yet. It will also include improvements to background auto save, system reset options, Effects Manager for plugins, and more GPU acceleration. It will also include dozens of smaller features that have been on editor’s wishlists for a while.

After Effects

In addition to After Effects celebrating 30 years, the upcoming update also comes with exciting new features. The most prominent one is the Properties Panel. This panel is similar to the Effects Control Panel from Premiere Pro, and will make commonly accessed properties easier. Currently, After Effects users must drill down within layers on the timeline in order to access things like scale and position. But with this new panel, you can hopefully speed up your workflow. This should also make it easier for newer users who may be more familiar with the Premiere Pro interface to use After Effects.

Additionally, there will be new ACES and OpenColorIO integrations to maintain consistent color when sharing assets with other apps in your pipeline. Some top-requested features will also make it into the update. This includes selectable track mattes to make it easier to re-use mattes on different layers, as well as multi-frame rendering of shapes.

Frame.io

Frame.io is coming with new security features that will certainly be beneficial to large companies with sensitive information. This comes in the form of forensic watermarking, which is an invisible watermark that can be used to trace back a piece of video to the source. It also survives transcodes, live streams, and screen recordings.

Frame.io for photographers is also coming. It supports RAW images, PSD, AI, and INDD file types. The commenting process is great, allowing commenters to select specific areas of the image to leave their comment on.