Adobe has unveiled a new Public Beta for AE, as well as new features for Premiere. Let’s take a sneak peek.

A month after announcing a new Public Beta for Premiere Pro, Adobe is back with news regarding even more updates for both After Effects and Premiere Pro. 

However, the big headlines are for After Effects. These new updates and tweaks promise to speed up the digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application, as well as add some improvements for previews, monitoring, exporting, and effects.

Premiere Pro is also set to see some new additions and improvements as it promises to be “the only NLE with auto captioning” for speech-to-text controls and customizations. Premiere Pro is also getting upgrades for legacy titles (finally), titling and caption styling, and other workflow refinements.

So, before you test on the new AE Public Beta, or choose to dive into any of these new improvements to Premiere Pro, let’s take a look at this whole smorgasbord of Adobe updates, including some nice surprises for speed and functionality on other programs like Character Animator.

After Effects Growing Faster

Depending on where you are in your video editing journey, After Effects is already either too powerful or simply not powerful enough. It’s a handy program for a wide array of motion graphics, visual effects, and other compositing needs. But, to some, it still needs to kick it up a notch in terms of speed and plugins.

Adobe announced that it’s offering new additional features in a Public Beta that “promises to speed up your workflow even more,” with faster previews, better monitoring, faster exporting and notifications, faster effects, and new partner plugins and hardwares.

From Adobe, these Public Beta features are set to include:

• Faster Previews and Renders: Previews up to 3x faster. After Effects automatically adjusts resource usage to render your composition as fast as possible on your hardware.
• Reimagined Render Queue with Remote Notifications: Highlights the most important information, such as rendering progress. Get notified when renders are complete via Creative Cloud desktop, mobile app, or email.
• Speculative Preview: Renders compositions while idle so it’s ready to preview when you return.
• Export Faster with Adobe Media Encoder: Up to 3x faster. Work on your compositions while Adobe Media Encoder renders in the background.

Character Animator Updates

On a similar note, Adobe is also doubling down on its Character Animator program with its own Public Beta and improvements developed to better work with the new M1 Macs, including speeding up imports and exports, a new Puppet Maker interface, and body tracking controls.

Also from Adobe, here’s what’s new with Character Animator:

• Character Animator on M1 Macs: Puppet and Artwork import is 2x faster and switching between workspaces is up to 3x faster.
• Puppet Maker (Public Beta): With the simple interface, anyone can pick hairstyles, skin tones, accessories, and much more. Watch your character react to your movements and voice in real time.
• Body Tracker (Public Beta): Powered by Adobe Sensei, creators can animate their entire body all at once, using movements and gestures to animate their puppets. Characters come alive by tracking arms, torso, and legs. 

Updates for Premiere Pro

For those of us who still use Premiere Pro for the majority of their video editing needs, though, the most exciting news might be these updates Adobe has announced for Premiere Pro. As mentioned above, Premiere Pro is going to finally get speech-to-text functionality, which will come as a free part of your Premiere Pro (or Creative Cloud) subscription.

This means you’ll be able to automatically generate and easily edit transcripts of the audio in your videos. This is HUGE news for documentary or any other type of interview work, which is quite common in professional video production. There are also some cool new captioning customizations to give control over how these captions look and feel on screen.

From Adobe, here are the major highlights from these new Premiere Pro updates:

• Improved titling and caption styling tools in Essential Graphics Panel:
  • Multiple shadows for text layers
  • Text background improvement
  • Expanded font substitution
• Upgrade Legacy Titles: Transition to modern titling tools with new commands to convert Legacy Titles into Source Graphics.
• Workflow refinements: Updates across color and collaboration features to help you work faster.
  • Tetrahedral LUT interpolation
  • More control with clip names and label colors 
• Optimized Scene Edit Detection (powered by Adobe Sensei): Up to 2x faster across Windows and macOS, and almost 3x faster on Apple M1.
• Automatic Device Switching on Windows (all apps): Creative Cloud video applications automatically switch when swapping out audio devices, such as interfaces, microphones, or headphones.

Overall, these updates should represent a comprehensive focus on workflow speed and reliability, as Adobe appears to be doubling down on improving both Premiere Pro and After Effects as they lead into their usually-crowded Adobe MAX time of year.

All of these new features should be available to use within the Adobe Creative Cloud as of July 20th, 2021, with the Public Beta available to download for After Effects from now until Adobe MAX in late October.

We’ll keep you posted on any new updates or improvements until then. 

If you’d like to learn more about using Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, check out these articles and tutorials:

Cover image via Adobe.