After Effects, Premiere, and Photoshop received new features that will benefit your projects.
Adobe recently introduced several new features that you need to know about! Let's take a look at some of the most beneficial additions for VFX artists and content creators across Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.
After Effects
Real-Time 3D Draft Preview
One of the most important updates is the new Real-Time Engine, enabling a much more responsive workflow when animating in 3D.
This addresses the issue most After Effects users have been plagued with when animating 3D scenes, dealing with the incredibly frustrating problem of choppy playback during animation. Real-Time 3D Draft Preview drastically reduces lag (in fact, Adobe claims it offers “instant feedback”), granting a much smoother 3D animation process.
According to Adobe, you’ll still need to cache 2D content before achieving smooth playback, so keep that in mind if your scene is incorporating 2D layers.To enable the 3D Draft Preview, first add 3D elements to your project. Then, you’ll see the “Draft 3D” button in the composition panel toolbar. Simply toggle it on to instantly scrub through your animation.
3D Ground Plane
This one’s pretty straightforward, but it’s definitely a much-needed addition to After Effects! Besides the “Draft 3D” button, you’ll find an icon that adds a 3D ground plane to your composition. This gives users an easy reference when creating 3D animations, and it will certainly help make creative decisions when positioning elements and creating camera movements.
Content-Aware Fill for Video Lighting Correction
Released a couple of months ago in a more incremental update, you may have missed this subtle (but very useful) addition to the Content-Aware Fill for Video panel.
One of the shortcomings of Content-Aware Fill for Video was the lack of lighting correction. Depending on your scene, you may have encountered difficulty removing objects when your scene featured lighting changes. Now when you apply Content-Aware Fill for Video, you’ll find a button called “Lighting Correction,” which allows you to toggle between a subtle, moderate, or strong lighting match. This should make a big difference in successfully applying Content-Aware Fill for Video in more dynamic lighting conditions.
Multi-Frame Rendering (Beta Only)
Multi-Frame Rendering adds the biggest speed improvement yet to After Effects. You won’t find it in the official release of After Effects, but if you are an After Effects beta user, you should notice a tremendous leap in render efficiency.Most exciting of all, this is just the first step in a clear plan to make rendering much faster across all Creative Cloud video apps. The video above also mentions future plans for adding mobile notifications to let you know once a render is complete...so we’re eagerly awaiting that feature!
You can learn more about Multi-Frame Rendering on Adobe’s blog.
Premiere Pro
Media Replacement (Essential Graphics)
The new Media Replacement feature makes adjusting MOGRT files easier than ever in Premiere Pro.
When creating your template in After Effects, just drag the layer of the media you’d like to make replaceable into the Essential Graphics panel. This creates a customizable property that can then be replaced with ease in Premiere Pro.
This works for both video and still images, so it’s perfect for creating a high volume of customized content with the same look and feel. You can also swap out logos in a snap!
Warp Stabilizer is Quicker
Warp Stabilizer has often caused even higher-end systems to chug along at times, but now users can see a massive speed boost when stabilizing footage.
New Stylized Caption Workflow | Premiere Pro
Whether generating captions are part of your everyday routine or you've yet to dive into the world of captioning, Premiere's new tools make it easier than ever to incorporate captions into your video.
Not only are captions helpful in making your video more accessible, generating your own captions ensures accuracy (versus auto-generated ones), and it also gives you the advantage of drawing in audiences on mobile devices when their feed is muted.
If you create a lot of social content, you can choose to bake captions into your video with completely customized styles, perfect for matching your brand.
In this update, the Captions workflow has changed pretty significantly, with everything now residing in the new “Captions” panel. Most exciting of all, if you’re part of the beta program, you also have the ability to automatically transcribe your audio with a single click.
Audio is uploaded to the cloud for transcription, then captions are automatically imported at the corresponding points on the timeline. Now, there's no reason not to include captions with your videos! This transcription feature should be available to all Premiere users in a later update.
Photoshop
Super Resolution
Enlarged photos now retain an incredible amount of detail with Super Resolution.
If you’ve ever been stuck on a video project using low-res JPEGs, Super Resolution can help solve this problem by effectively doubling your image’s original resolution, with little to no discernible quality loss.
To use Super Resolution, just follow these steps:
Open a RAW file in Camera Raw
Right-click the image and choose “Enhance”
Check “Super Resolution” and click “Enhance”
If you’d like to upscale a JPEG or TIFF file, you need to make a couple of adjustments to your preferences.
In Photoshop, you cannot access Super Resolution when you select Filter > Camera Raw Filter. To use this feature, open the image by selecting File > Open. Raw files open in the Camera Raw dialog box by default. To open JPEGs or TIFFs, select Edit > Preferences > Camera Raw and in the File Handling tab, set JPEG or TIFF to Automatically open all supported JPEGs or TIFFs.
You can see it in action below! It does a great job at not only upscaling the image, but also providing a few very helpful adjustments to make the process as seamless as possible.
Once your image is upscaled, you can fine-tune the Camera Raw settings to ensure your image is clear and polished, which is a major bonus.
It’s also worth noting that Super Resolution can only be used once on a single image, so no infinite upscaling is available (...yet).
All in all, these are quite a few substantial updates worth checking out that should make life much easier for Creative Cloud users.
Which new feature are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments below!
