Updates for Premiere Pro

Adobe has announced another set of updates to its video editing apps under the “Creative Cloud” banner. Premiere Pro, SpeedGrade and After Effects all get revisions.

Most obviously, there are updates to the user interface though disappointingly for us short-sighted folk, their icons remain as infuriatingly tiny as ever they were; perhaps Adobe should issue a free magnifying glass with every copy?

And call us small-minded whingers if you like but it does seem that some of the company’s “new features” have a very old-hat feel about them. For example, they’re touting a new “Consolidate and transcode” for project archiving – as the likes of Avid would testify, that’s hardly ground breaking stuff.

Likewise the positively mind-bending addition of – wait for it – adjustable curves in Speedgrade plus realtime previews of effects. And, edge of your seat stuff this, freehand drawing of masks with Bezier curves and feathering on the points. Crikey; welcome to the 21st century, Adobe!

On a more positive note, there are interesting new ways of working with multiple projects and sections thereof (something we wish the good folks at Sony Creative Software would take note of for Vegas Pro) including a way of simultaneously viewing the timeline of a source project with the timeline of the project you’re working on, so you can easily drag and drop bits from one to the other. That’s very handy.

You can also now create metadata-based search bins to make rifling through all your media that much easier, and there’s support for GoPro’s Cineform intermediate codec and AJA RAW files. Export from Adobe Encoder also now includes improved FTP options.

Subscribers to Adobe’s monthly payment plan will get all this automatically of course. If you’re not and you’re undecided, take a look at www.adobe.com/go/video