IBC 2024: Adobe introduces upgrades for Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro

Adobe After Effects makes it easier for motion designers and video editors to animate and blend 3D objects seamlessly with real-world footage and 2D elements.

Customers have been blending 2D and 3D assets in After Effects for years through integration with 3rd party apps. Now you can do a lot of that work right inside of After Effects, helping to streamline workflow and making the use of 3D elements far more approachable.

The response from the motion design community has been full of excitement, followed by a number of meaningful feature requests. We’ve heard the community loud and clear, and these updates are a direct response to the enthusiasm and passion of After Effects users.

While motion designers and video editors love working with 3D models, they can sometimes appear ultra “digital” and sharp. In order to make it easier to work with 3D models and have them seamlessly blend into 2D environments, we released a number of tools and controls to make it easier than ever to design in 3D and 2D at the same time. Additionally, many After Effects users are new to animating and compositing in 3D. With endless 3D models available from Adobe Substance 3D, Adobe Stock, and online marketplaces, motion designers want to be able to craft their work with the embedded animations that come included with their models as they dive deep into the 3D world.

Now in After Effects, motion designers have an expanded range of tools when working with native 3D objects in the 3D workspace. Three major new features allow designers to make their 3D objects blend seamlessly and photo-realistically in real-world environments:

• Embedded 3D Animations: After Effects now supports embedded 3D animations from imported 3D models. Artists can breathe life into characters and objects created by external animation software. Seamlessly import 3D models (GLB or GLTF) with embedded animations such as skeletal rigs. Keyframe animations and bone-based deformations are natively supported and can be smoothly retimed. With embedded 3D animations, After Effects becomes a great place for motion designers to get started working in 3D in the motion design app they already know and love.
• Ultra-Realistic Shadows and Colour Shadows: After Effects introduces shadow catchers, allowing 3D objects to interact realistically with video footage. Shadows cast by virtual objects onto the environment are accurately captured. Colour shadows enhance realism, since shadows cast in the real world are rarely a pure shade of black or grey.
• Depth Mapping for 3D Models: Depth maps are essential for compositing 3D elements into live-action footage. Extract depth maps from Advanced 3D scenes just by precomposing. These maps encode the distance information for each pixel, enabling post-processing effects like depth-of-field blur or fog.

New animation presets

With over 30 all new animation presets and number counting presets for infographics, designers in After Effects can spend less time keyframing a wide variety of animations and spend more time on creative motion design.

Camera and light support in the Properties panel

The Properties panel accelerates workflows by placing frequently used controls in one contextual panel. New for Autumn 2024, designers can now adjust and control their cameras and lights in the properties panel to fine-tune their motion designs.

Faster performance and a fresh new design

After Effects is also getting faster with hardware accelerated UI/UX performance on Windows that’s up to 4x faster than before, making the application snappier, more modern feeling, and more interactive.

There’s also a fresh, new design in After Effects (Beta) that’s modern and more consistent so designers and editors spend less time re-learning how to use tools in our different apps and more time creating.

After Effects and Adobe Substance 3D

As After Effects expands its 3D capabilities, its workflow connected to Substance 3D becomes even more powerful. Together these tools can significantly enhance the visual quality and output of After Effects’ growing 3D toolset:

• Substance 3D Painter: Now featuring a connected “Send to After Effects” function, allowing you to precision-texture your 3D models and import them directly into your compositions with a single click.
• Substance 3D Sampler: Quickly create seamless materials with normal maps or generate IBL environment lights from photographs, perfect for harmonizing 3D elements within your After Effects scenes to customize environments and match locations.

Substance 3D Assets: Gives motion designers access to over 20,000 fully licensed, ready-to-use parametric materials, 3D models, and environment lights to jumpstart your 3D projects in After Effects.

Adding Substance 3D to your motion design workflow will make your 3D content in After Effects look better than ever. Any materials and textured models you create with Substance will shine in After Effects and look great across other 3D applications like Maxon’s Cinema 4D, creating visual consistency throughout your workflow. Learn more about Substance 3D and After Effects for 3D motion design.

Availability

Check out these new 3D and animation features now in After Effects.

Our refreshed, modern UI is available in beta now. For more information on how to access the beta apps, please visit the After Effects (beta) page.

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Adobe introduces major colour management updates in Adobe Premiere Pro (beta)

In our regular conversations with the video editing community, a common theme has emerged over the last few years: the need to work faster and more efficiently as they handle increasing demands for short and long form content. This makes performance, reliability, and access to seamless workflows more critical than it has ever been. With tight budgets, editors need an effective tool to perform comprehensive post-production workflows — from organizing media, editing picture and audio, adding effects and motion graphics, colour grading, and delivering final assets.

Directly influenced by top community requests, the latest version of Premiere Pro (beta) brings major colour management and performance updates to help editors deliver video projects faster than ever before.

First, let’s talk about colour. More specifically, let’s talk about colour management. We are beyond thrilled to deliver an entirely new colour management system in Premiere Pro that transforms raw and log formats from nearly every camera into stunning, consistent footage instantly upon import — without requiring LUTs. We’re serious about colour, and this new colour management system is just the beginning of making professional colour workflows more powerful and accessible for video editors right inside Premiere Pro.

Next up: let’s talk about speed and performance — a new context-sensitive properties panel puts the tools editors need right at their fingertips and enables modifying multiple clips at the same time to reduce mouse mileage. Paired with additional hardware acceleration for faster playback of codecs like AVC and HEVC and ProRes exports at triple the speed, this is the fastest version of Premiere Pro yet.

Colour management

Today’s cameras — from an 8K RED V-Raptor to the iPhone 15 Pro in your pocket — capture raw or log media that contains more colour and dynamic range data than any monitor can display. That means, the vast colour information captured by these cameras needs to be moved into a colour space that our computers can work with and that today’s monitors can actually display. Rather than simply map source files into a reduced colour space that causes data loss and image clipping, unique algorithms that intelligently tone map the data into a working colour space that preserves the highest possible amount of data and quality is critical to achieving the kind of professional results customers want.

There are dozens of raw and log formats, each with their own unique characteristics. While managing complex colour science is second nature for professional colourists, editors need a foolproof system that gives them great results with minimum input, while also providing deep pros the level of control they need to create custom workflows.

The all new Premiere colour management combines all of this technology in a way that makes it easier to work with raw and log formats natively in Premiere Pro so you always get a great starting point — you’ll see great-looking footage as soon as clips are dropped into the timeline — without having to spend time adding LUTs. This automatic system normalizes raw and log media while taking advantage of all that data in the colour pipeline for better control and beautiful images.

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Colour management should be nearly invisible: Editors shouldn’t need a lab coat to manage it, so we made this system simple enough for any video editor to use, regardless of their experience with advanced colour science. Premiere colour management provides:

• An entirely new colour management system that automatically transforms RAW and log footage from nearly every camera into great-looking SDR and HDR, so users can spend less time managing LUTs and start editing right away.
• A new wide gamut working colour space that’s vastly larger than Premiere’s HD Rec.709 working space in which all image processing operations are performed. This new wide gamut colour space leverages Hollywood’s industry standard ACEScct with high-fidelity tone mapping that provides the kind of colour and fidelity results that were previously impossible with Premiere Pro.
• Six simple “set-it-and-forget-it” presets in Sequence Settings and Lumetri colour settings let users work in traditional Rec.709 for legacy projects or the new wide gamut colour ACEScct with ease.
• Most-used effects, like Lumetri, are now colour space aware with smoother and more flexible control for refining skin tones, balance, and creative looks when working in a wide-gamut preset.
• Consistent colour and brightness when using Dynamic Link to send clips to and from Adobe After Effects for motion design and compositing.

Check out complete documentation for more information.

New Properties panel

We’re also introducing a new Properties panel that makes Premiere Pro easier to learn for beginners and makes video editing even faster for experienced professionals.

It takes the most popular effects, adjustments, and tools in an all-in-one, easily surfaced, and context-sensitive panel that shows editors everything they want to adjust and hides anything else based on the media type selected in the timeline — whether it’s video, audio, graphics, or captions. This reduces mouse travel, provides fast access to relevant panels for advanced work, and eliminates the need to search and navigate multiple panels to get to the needed tool.

With the Properties panel, editors can do things they’ve never been able to do before in Premiere Pro, like crop video directly from the Program monitor, or highlight and adjust the properties of multiple clips or graphics at the same time. Consolidating the most frequently used tools in a single panel, along with the ability to directly manipulate (crop and reposition) images using on-screen controls, and the ability to batch process multiple clips at a time make this a game changer for anyone editing in Premiere Pro. It makes it easier for new users to learn the app, and more efficient for existing power users to work quickly.

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Faster performance and a fresh, modern design

We’ve been working hard at making Premiere Pro faster and more reliable for every job. With even more hardware acceleration, you’ll have faster playback for codecs like AVC and HEVC. ProRes exports are now up to 3x faster so editors can deliver cuts to clients faster and get home earlier. We’ve also added format support for even more Canon, Sony, and RED cameras so users can import native files and start editing immediately. Read here for more details.

Lastly, we’re proud to deliver a fresh, new design that’s modern and more consistent. With two dark modes, a light mode, and high-contrast accessibility mode, editors can customize the look and feel of Premiere Pro. Users also get cleaner fonts and typography for better legibility and consistency with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps. That means less time spent re-learning how to use tools in different apps and more time creating.

Availability

All these features are available now in beta and are planned to be generally available this Autumn. We’re serious about colour, and Premiere colour management is just the beginning of our commitment to improving professional colour for video editors. Let us know what you want to see next, we’re just getting started.

For more information on how to access the beta apps, please visit the Premiere Pro (beta) page today.