The new Premiere Pro features include the ability to use your iPhone’s HDR footage in SDR projects without ending up with too bright video and washed-out color.
- What’s happening? Ahead of the 2023 NAB show, Photoshop maker Adobe has unveiled upcoming new features for its Premiere Pro video-editing software, which will be generally available to users beginning in May.
- Why care? For one, Premiere Pro will finally let you use HDR footage shot on iPhone in your SDR projects without colors being washed out.
- What to do? Read the announcement on the Adobe website.
Premiere Pro gaining text-based video editing
Text-based video editing powered by Sensei (Adobe’s artificial intelligence in the cloud) promises to make editing video as easy as copying and pasting text.
Premiere will automatically transcribe clips. This will let you copy and paste transcribed text into any order, with the app automatically applying changes to the timeline with new cuts (you can search transcripts for exact words and phrases).
You are still going to need to fine-tune details and make manual edits to your project. Regardless, this will be a massive time-saver for video editors. Premiere is the only non-linear video editing software to implement this feature.
Fixing iPhone HDR footage, automatic tone mapping
Automatic tone mapping and Log Color Detection will let you mix and match HDR footage from different sources in the same SDR project.
You could do that before, but you would end up with washed-out colors because Premiere didn’t know how to properly mix footage with different color spaces.
This will be especially relevant to people who would like to import HDR footage shot on their iPhone into Premiere and use it in SDR projects (the same applies to mixing HDR footage shot on other cameras.)
Faster performance, multi-frame shape rendering, etc.
Aside from the new features mentioned above, Adobe’s announcement lists a bunch of nice-to-haves, like background auto-save, faster timeline layer selection, multi-frame rendering of shapes, new keyboard shortcuts for Selectable Track Mattes, the new Properties panel, enhanced format support for the RED V-Raptor X, ARRI Alexa 35 and Sony Venice v2 cameras, GPU acceleration for debayering and transition effects, collaborative editing enhancements and much more.
Frame.io now supports photos and PDFs
Aloe said in a separate announcement that its Frame.io collaboration is expanding beyond video and now includes images and PDFs. Frame.io is a cloud-based service for video collaboration that streamlines and simplifies video workflows.
Adobe users will be able to upload RAW photos directly to the cloud, starting with the Fujifilm X-H2 and X-H2S cameras. There are new security features, too.
One of them, bubbled Forensic Watermarking, is especially interesting. What this does is put a hidden watermark on footage so you can easily investigate leaks with audits. Forensic Watermark leverages pixel-level details that Adobe claims can survive “screen recording, file copying and external recording.”