Adobe Premiere Pro Gets a Significant Audio Workflow Overhaul
Thanks to significant audio workflow updates, Adobe Premiere Pro promises to be easier to use and more powerful than ever before.
Premiere Pro remains one of the world’s most popular video editing tools, with over 80% of this year’s Sundance Film Festival entries created using Premiere Pro and other Adobe Creative Cloud tools. However, there is always room for improvement. Today, ahead of the official start of this year’s Sundance, Adobe has debuted new audio innovations.
Among the new features are interactive fade handles on clips, allowing editors to click and drag to create custom audio fades. Further, unsurprisingly, there are new AI tools, including a new AI-powered audio categorization function that automatically labels clips depending on whether they are dialogue, music, sound effects, or ambient noise. Thanks to these tags, editors have one-click access to relevant tools for each type of audio.
Concerning labels, redesigned clip badges make it easier to see which clips include effects, add new effects, or adjust existing effects. Another user interface improvement comes in the form of more intelligent waveforms that dynamically resize when the track height is changed, and improved clip colors make it easier to see and work with audio on the Premiere Pro timeline.
All these new features are available today in Adobe Premiere Pro (beta). Adobe has also announced that its groundbreaking AI-powered Enhance Speech tool, which has been available in beta, will be coming to the app’s public release next month.
“Sound creates meaning, and adds impact to film and video — it has the power to help tell a story, and move us in ways visuals along cannot,” says Ashley Still, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Adobe Creative Cloud. “We’re proud to empower filmmakers with new workflows that make editing audio more intuitive, so whether they’re new to audio or experienced pros, Premiere Pro makes it faster and easier to find the perfect tool.”
Returning to the usage rates of Adobe software by the filmmakers featured at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, the numbers are really quite impressive. The annual Sundance Institute survey found that 57% of films were editing using Premiere Pro, 68% of this year’s films used either Premiere Pro or Frame.io, and 83% of the entries used one or more Adobe Creative Cloud applications, including After Effects, Photoshop, and Substance 3D.
“I cut the movie on Premiere Pro — it’s my go-to editing software because the interface is so intuitive and smooth,” explains Josh Margolin, writer and director of the film Thelma. “We also leaned on Frame.io heavily for reviewing cuts, color passes, and VFX.”
“On Didi, we edited in Premiere Pro Productions, which allowed both Chris [Tennant, assistant editor] and I to be in the project at the same time and effortlessly pass sequences back and forth,” says Arielle Zakowski, editor of Didi.
“Because our show Penelope was shot in the beautiful but remote forests of Washington, we had to think creatively in terms of our post workflow,” remarks Alex Regaldo, Duplass Brothers Productions, head of post for Penelope. “Premiere Pro, Camera to Cloud, and Frame.io gave us the power to keep everyone connected — including our assistant editors in Los Angeles, our VFX supervisor in New York, and our local production team in Seattle.”
Image credits: Adobe
