Adobe Announces July 2021 Update For Video Creators and More

Adobe announced it’s forth-coming updates to many of its Creative Cloud software that’s bound to make the workflow of a content creator even better, but also, better for the consumers of the content being created. There’s quite a bit coming in the world of video and animation, but also the graphics world. I’ll share a few details of those updates. Let’s start with Premiere Pro and captions.

Captions and Transcriptions in Premiere Pro

Adobe previously implemented some AI tech to help get transcription in video products, but this is now updated and ready to go with the July 2021. I watched a demo from Mr. Patrick Palmer showing off the new features of seamlessly creating captions and subtitles with Adobe Sensei AI. Subtitles in particular are becoming more and more popular today because many people struggle with impaired hearing concerns.

Image by Adobe

A faster experience in After Effects (beta)

I’ve used After Effects here and there for simple motion graphics and noise reduction in video. And I gotta tell ya, After Effects is SLOW when it comes to pre-rendering your footage during your edit. Some things are faster than others, but it can still be a bit of a bear unless you have quality hardware running the app. Yes, Adobe announced a performance boost, as usual, but this is a bit different as After Effects will now do speculative rendering in the background. This is useful if you’re in the middle of dialing in your effects controls and parameters. No more adjusting a parameter, hitting enter to render, seeing that the parameter didn’t quite work, changing the parameter, hitting enter to render and hoping you got it right. This is a beta preview, but coming soon.

Image by Adobe

More for your iPad with Adobe Fresco

The beautiful painting/digital art app Fresco has been updated providing more tools for the creative artist. Similar to Photoshop on iPad, Fresco allows the artist to work in layers. The ability to move objects and change blend modes are key to getting the art to really come together. Adobe has enhanced this with better functionality in moving and rotating items as well as adding grid tools. More on this app found on the Adobe blog post, here.

Screenshot via Adobe

Adobe has its full rundown of updates across it suite of apps via separate blog posts. Check out more on the Premiere Pro updates here, After Effects here, Fresco here, and Character Animator here. No, I didn’t get into the improved support for Apple M1 chips because that’s to be expected. But I DO want to give kudos to Adobe for becoming part of the Blender Development fund. Blender is an amazing 3D modeling app that’s FREE. It’s nice seeing proprietary companies giving back to the open source community.

As usual, if you’re interested in signing up for the Adobe Creative Cloud, you can do so for as little as $10 per month using my affiliate link.

Adobe Continues Performance Boost for M1 Macs

Coming off the heels of WWDC, Adobe announces more updates for its Creative Cloud product line. Specifically, those compatible with the Apple M1 silicon. A lot of the products have been supported for a little while with others still being in beta status, but today some performance updates were announced.

Performance Boosted

Adobe teamed up with Pheiffer Report to take a look at performance of the Creative Cloud apps running on M1 Macs from Apple. The test hardware included the M1 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM), Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM) where both were connected to an Apple Pro Display XDR. Lots of benchmarking test were completed looking at Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more focusing on not only the simple use of the user interface (UI), but also some graphic-heavy or CPU-intensive functions of each app. It’s found that on average, the Creative Cloud apps are 80% faster using the M1 systems. Pretty impressive. Adobe and Pheiffer had a bunch of charts and information here showing all the details of the testing.

With that said, the video editor for Adobe, Premiere Pro, is still in beta status. I’ve not heard anything bad about the beta other than a few “quirks,” but it’s believed that the beta runs circles around the Intel version on performance.

Better Collaboration Tools and More Tools for Lightroom

I tend to focus more on the photography side of things when it comes to the Creative Cloud. Yes, I use Premiere, and After Effects, but I open Lightroom and Photoshop more often. Unfortunately, I’m not on an M1 so I don’t see these particular performance boosts. But Adobe has added more ways to collaborate on the photography front with cloud collaboration capability. This allows you to get an extra set of eyes on your photos project and tweak the editing before clicking “post” to Instagram or whatever your platform of choice is.

Image by Adobe

Far as the editing tools, the AI tool found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which enabled you to convert an image to a much higher resolution image is now available in Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom. This Super Resolution feature touts increasing your photog resolution by up to 4X. In my experience, the previous iteration was “ok.” Wasn’t great, but it did make a difference.

Adobe has a lot more information on its blog regarding the updates for Lightroom, Photoshop with its new custom brushes, Illustrator and more. I guess I better get myself ready to install these updates as well as find a way to get my hands on an M1 Mac. Ha!

On-the-Go Design Is Here To Stay and This Adobe Mobile Bundle Proves It

I remember a few years ago when I attended Adobe Max and “Lightroom CC” was announced. I also remember, at the time, Adobe renaming the Lightroom most already had to “Lightroom Classic.” A lot of uproar came from this. Some from me as I didn’t like the idea of putting all of my creative workflow into the mobile space. Turns out, it’s ok and works well for many creative artists. Not all, but many. Today Adobe continues its double-down approach to on-the-go creativity with its mobile design offering for iPad users.

Image source: Adobe

Creating No Matter Where You Are

If you’re an iPad user that happens to be a graphic designer/artist, getting Adobe Illustrator on the iPad was BIG. Now, the mobile-first initiative is in full swing as Adobe is now bundling Photoshop, Illustrator, Fresco, Spark and Creative Cloud apps in what it’s calling the “Design Mobile” package for iPad.

As usual, the pricing structure from Adobe creative products are based on a subscription model. You can pay an annual subscription fee of $149.99 or monthly at $14.99 per month. Adobe discusses it more on its blog post here.

Signing up for this service has to be done via the Apple App Store. At least at the time of creating this post. Here’s the link for that if you’re reading this on your iPad. Sounds like a nice deal.

Are you signing up? Or are you in the camp that already has the full suite of Adobe creative apps? I’m curious to know how this may affect the full suite subscribers. I pay for the full suite and use a good bit of the apps, but not all of them. So it is definitely a good value for me? What about you? Thoughts?