Adobe Announce New Partnerships and Key Collaboration Tools at Adobe Max 2022

Adobe Max 2022 kicks off in Los Angeles with many expectations in this world of content creations with AI becoming more of a norm in the creative space. Adobe is set to announce improvements to its Adobe Sensei AI with several new tools built into it’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro tools and more. AI has been controversial in the creative space recently, but as I’ve said many times before, AI can be GREAT for content creators in an effort to speed up repetitive tasks. Here are some of the tools of note coming from Adobe.

Image: Adobe

Even Better Masking and Selections in Photoshop and Lightroom

Better AI for creating masks and selections in the photography tools will be a big hit. Selections and masks allow creators to work even better with compositing images or get into fine details of the retouching processing. Object selection in the 2021 release of Photoshop was pretty dadgum good. It’s now been optimized even further for better performance. This selection performance will also be available in Lightroom. In addition to the selection updates, Lightroom will also see a performance boost in healing brush and content-aware fill. More information on the Lightroom updates are available here on the Adobe blog, and here for the Photoshop updates.

Image: Adobe

Adobe Video Updates

On the video side of things, Premiere Pro and After Effects will see a performance boost in renders as well as faster performance on motion graphics templates (.mogrt files). I dig Premiere Pro, but found the .mogrt files included with the subscription to be PAINFULLY slow at times. So slow that whenever I found a graphic, I’d just try to build it myself from scratch because it rendered on the timeline faster. Native H.264 encoding will now be available in After Effects directly from the render queue instead of having to jump into the Adobe Media Encoder (AME) app. After Effects will also have some public beta announcements regarding track mattes, and animation presets as mentioned in the video below as well as on the Adobe blog here.

Cloud Collaboration Rules

Adobe previously announced it’s Frame.IO integration and it’s a big hit for video creators collaborating with other creators, as well as speeding up the review process with clients. Now, Adobe is partnering up with RED and Fujifilm for even more Camera-to-Cloud integration. It’s no secret that RED cameras are found on many sets of some of the biggest television series and movies on the market. Adobe has now certified Red and Fujifilm as partners in Camera-to-Cloud (C2C). What does this mean? Proxy and RAW assets captured on the likes of a Red V-Raptor can be uploaded to the FrameIO service allowing collaborators access to assets needed for the post-production process. A great demo is in the video below.


Adobe Max is available for free as a virtual event if you’re interested in checking it out. I wasn’t able to go this year, but I’m registered and look forward to checking out more from the team including some of their sneak peak projects.

Adobe "Modernizes" Premiere Pro With New Beta UI

Most content creators are familiar with Adobe’s video creation tool, Premiere Pro*. Yes, there’s a bit of a love hate relationship with this software, but it really does do a good job making high quality video creation accessible to many. The UI has been fine for me, but apparently, Adobe and the community thought the user interface could be improved. So, the Adobe video team is doing just that via a public beta.

Image by Adobe

Image by Adobe

Phase 1 of the beta update: removing the techno mumbo jumbo

When launching Premiere Pro, the existing opening dialog to create a new project is fairly extensive. You have the open to name the file, but then you also have scratch disk, ingest and processing options to address. Most of the items on that opening dialog really isn’t needed just to “create” a new project. Adobe and the community has realized that and is getting rid of this information. Adobe is streamlining this opening dialog for a more visual interface allowing you to see your media and set necessary project parameters on one screen instead of multiple tabs. It ALMOST looks like the opening screen of Premiere Rush. Almost.

Image by Adobe

Image by Adobe

Once you’re into your project, the timeline interface and workspace looks fairly similar with a few tweaks to the menus and panel headings. For example, the main header bar is not as big as it used to be. This now gives you a few more pixels of screen space for your source and program monitors. Adobe states that this is an effort to not only give a few more pixels of screen real estate, but also an effort to unify the user experience (UX) across other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Lightroom and After Effects.

Exporting the content you create is very similar to the Premiere Rush interface. You get a couple presets to handle the export based on the platform where the content will be viewed. Video formatting varies from platform to platform. Having presets allows your content to be viewed in its best format on the platform without a bunch of compression and artifacts.

As a Premiere Pro* user, I will have to ease into the new redesign. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to using my creative apps. Heck my current layout of Premiere Pro has a custom workspace that I set up to better fit my needs. Fortunately, this will still be an option for us old dogs struggling to learn new tricks.

This is only the first phase of the new interface redesign. Adobe didn’t specify a timeline for subsequent phases, but wanted to reiterate that phase one is all about getting started with a project as well as the export process. Adobe did mention that more updates are coming to the Lumetri color panel as well as background video rendering beyond using Adobe Media Encoder software. Find out more about the beta here on the Adobe blog.



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