We Take a Look at the New Features in Adobe's Video Software

If you’ve been watching this space the last few months, you’ve seen our previous write-ups of the latest features in our most frequently used Adobe products. We’ve explored what’s new in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, and now we come to the last of our four workhorse pieces of Adobe software: Premiere Pro.

Premiere seems to occupy a different position than its Adobe cohorts. While it can be called the leader in its category, Premiere has a prominent challenger in the high-end, professional video editing market. On Mac OS, Final Cut Pro offers an alternative to Premiere with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. It’s reflective of the Mac vs PC trade-off as a whole—simplicity with the former, customizability with the latter.

This competition likely has an influence on the developers at Adobe as they work to ensure Premiere remains the preferred software on both major operating systems. As such, we’re seeing more dramatic improvements to Premiere’s functionality, even in version 14.2.

With this in mind, let us dive into what’s new in Premiere 14.2.

Auto-Reframe Now Works Faster

Adobe introduced Auto-Reframe with Premiere 14.0 in November 2019 as a tool to help streamline editing for multiple platforms. You can edit in a standard 16:9 ratio (think landscape mode), 1:1 for social media, or 9:16 (portrait mode). The tool uses machine learning technology to identify and frame the subjects of your shots and uses that information to compose the resized shot.

In the new version 14.2, there are two improvements to Auto-Reframe. First, Adobe has tuned the technology, so it now works faster. The whole point of Auto-Reframe is to save time, so any improvement in this arena makes the feature all the better.

The other enhancement is that users can now copy and edit keyframes while using the Auto Reframe effect, so it’s easier to fine-tune transitions while using the tool.

Whatever platform you’re editing for, Auto-Reframe is poised to revolutionize your workflow, and we’re glad to see any improvements to this tool.

Map Marker Colors to Keyboard Shortcuts

This is one of those things that it’s almost surprising to think you couldn’t do this before.

Now, you can customize your keyboard shortcuts to include hotkeys for all available colors of markers so you can easily tag your tracks with multiple streams of information.

To change your keyboard shortcuts, simply go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts (Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts on Mac OS) to bring up the dialog box. You can then search for “marker” in the command panel and choose from the available marker colors.

An earth-shattering change? No. But definitely an improvement that makes life easier for users.

Enhanced Encoding with Hardware Acceleration

Premiere now features support for NVIDIA and AMD graphics processors on Windows. So now Premiere can access the power of your GPU when using H.264 and H.265 encoding (used for MPEG layer-4 file types like .mp4, .mov, .f4v, or .3gp).

Put simply, H.264 and H.265 are the coding processes used to create various file types.

The ability to access the GPU for these processes means consistently faster export times for a variety of popular file formats. Yet another update designed to increase speed for the user.

Support for ProRes RAW

This is a change that may well work to enhance the appeal of Premiere to Mac users. ProRes RAW is a file format created in part by Apple that offers the quality and adaptability of raw data in a compressed file that takes up less space than file types of similar quality.

ProRes RAW was introduced in 2018, and has been exclusive to Apple—and, by extension, Final Cut—until now. Now videographers can use their preferred editing software with this highly versatile file format.

There are a few requirements for users who wish to use this file format with Premiere Pro. Windows users will need an NVIDIA display card with updated drivers, and a recommended 4GB or more of video memory. On top of that, they’ll have to install ProRes Raw Decoder from Apple and make sure the CUDA renderer is selected in the Video Rendering preferences panel.

Mac users will need to be running MacOS Mojave 10.14.5 or Catalina 10.15 or later. They will also need to be running the Metal renderer and install Pro Video Formats 2.1.1 (or later) from Apple.

While this may not be accessible to all users, this is great news for those who are able to use this highly-rated file format with Premiere Pro.

With these changes, we see Premiere taking steps to enhance the experience of the day-to-day user. Increased speed, a greater range of keyboard shortcuts, and greater file flexibility will make real difference to editors.

We plan on keeping up with updates to the Adobe programs we depend on here at Kokopelli. As major versions are released, we’ll take a closer look at what sets them apart and how the changes will impact users everywhere.