Adobe took the opportunity of the Sundance Film Festival to highlight a number of new features coming to their video applications in the Creative Cloud suit. Premiere Pro has become more popular for editing feature films, as Adobe continues to improve the application. After Effects has always had a place in the film and VFX world, and Frame.IO has become a widely used cloud tool as its capabilities grow beyond review and approval functionality.
There are a number of noteworthy features that are now available in the public beta versions of Premiere and After Effects. Premiere’s automatic caption generation functionality has been extended to include automatic translation to 17 different languages. This translation requires an internet connection, because the processing occurs in the cloud, uploading the locally created transcription to a server for the translation process, and automatically populating the timeline with the resulting translated captions. This will lead to lots of caption tracks in the timeline, and Premiere Pro now allows users to view more than one caption track at a time.
There is a new Search panel, which sits on top of a new AI power Media Intelligence feature, which analyses source footage, and allows natural language search of the image content of video clips, as well as their transcribed audio and metadata. This is a pretty great feature for large projects with lots of unique footage to sort through. I tested it on some existing footage I had on my system, and it was able to respond to various complex queries of the content, and imagery. It can also lead the user to the exact spot something occurs in a long clip, if your source footage is long captures, instead of individual clips.
The way this works under the hood, is that Premiere can analyze your footage upon import into the project. This is a reasonably fast process background task, but is storage dependent as it requires a full read and decode of the source file. It was 10x real time on my external spinning disk, and 30x real-time on my NVMe SSD, when I tested a feature length 4GB MP4 file. That process results in the creation of a .prmi (PRemiere Media Intelligence) files for each clip, which appear to be about 20MB/hour. These are similar in behavior and management to the .pek and .cfm files that Premiere users are probably familiar with. Similar to other cache files, the user has the option to store these as sidecar files next to the media, or in the system’s media cache location, or just in the specific project. Sidecar files are super annoying, but the best option to avoid redundant processing when working with others. Keeping them in the media cache should be sufficient for most users, unless you are constantly sharing huge amounts of media with other users on a SAN or NAS.
While that search feature is cool, and translation will be helpful to me in certain unique moments, the upcoming Premiere Pro functionality I am most looking forward to, is the new color management system. I have been playing with this in Beta for a few months now, and am very excited about the new workflow possibilities it opens up for HDR editing and exports, and to fully unlock the image quality available within digital cinema camera recordings.
The main shift that we are going to see here, is a Wide Gamut working space, (which matches ACEScct) that Premiere can convert all of the source input content to, and then from there, correctly output HDR or SDR exports. This involves a number of color transformations to be applied by the GPU, each of which is a fairly simple operation, but they may start to stack up. For my Red to HDR HEVC benchmark encoding tests, the RAW R3D files are decoded and de-mosaiced into REDWideGamutRGB at Log3G10, which is converted into ACEScct on the timeline for processing any edits, and the result of that is converted to Rec.2100 PQ with HDR metadata applied as it is encoded to HEVC. This is a lot of processing, before I even add any Lumetri color grades or stylized LUTs. So this is where that extra GPU power of the last few generations will come back into effect. The end result is that users should be able to go from any source format, to any output format, at maximum quality, without the previous Rec.709 limitations. Just make sure you have sufficient GPU power before you enable all of these new high quality options.
And because this new color management system involves so many new options and settings, which will vary greatly depending on specific user needs, this is a case where Premiere’s project template functionality may be very helpful. I usually think of template projects in terms of pre-defining bin structure and common branding assets, but it could be used purely for setting your project and sequence settings to ways you like, which might not match the application defaults. I highly recommend users invest the 5 minutes it takes to create their own custom template project, with all of the settings they usually use.
After Effects is also getting some new updates, the first one being better HDR support. to allow it to better integrate with Premiere Pro projects using the new color management options. There will now be support for live HDR monitoring in AE compositions, as well as HDR scopes to view. This will help with broader support for color management of assets being round tripped to and from Premiere Pro. After Effects also has new support for frame caching on SSDs instead of just in RAM, and allowing direct playback of those frames, resulting in much longer frame preview caches, and better playback performance.
