New Software Spotlight: Adobe Creative Cloud for Video, April 2015

Adobe has released a major update to its Creative Cloud for Video platform that will add to your video creativity through re-invented color workflows and a new mobile app that will help you capture Looks (color schemes) for video. There is a new interactive desktop animation tool and there are expanded collaboration capabilities including easier asset sharing, and other things that let you do more with video than ever before.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015

Adobe Premiere Pro is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software application. It has gained acceptance within the film and video industry. Adobe Premiere Pro CC attempts to reduce the complexity of video production.

What’s New in Premiere Pro CC 2015

• Faster color workflows: With the Lumetri Color panel you will be able to expand your creative range. You can now give each project its own distinctive look through this panel and a new color workspace.

• Integration with Project “Candy” lets you apply Looks – color schemes created with the new mobile app Project “Candy” – to your videos.

• Morph Cut: Deliver more polished interviews by smoothing out jump cuts through face tracking and frame interpolation. When working with talking heads your sequences will be more seamless and have a more professional appearance.

• Better integration between Premiere Clip, Adobe’s mobile app, and Premiere Pro means that you will have a more seamless transition between mobile editing and your desktop application. You will be able to open a Clip project directly in Premiere Pro and begin working with it immediately.

• Creative Cloud Libraries will allow you to share assets between team members, Adobe applications, and projects giving you more flexible collaborations as well as instant access to the things that you need.

• Task-oriented workspaces will help you organize your tools so they’re where you want them. You can switch between preset and custom workspace layouts that let you place what you need where you need it depending on what phase you are working on. This includes both desktop and mobile devices.

• More video formats provide you the ability to edit natively in Premiere Pro formats like Apple ProRes 4444 XQ, Avid DNxHR with compressed alpha, Canon XF-AVC, MXF-wrapped JPEG 2000, and Panasonic 4K_HS.

• New editing refinements result in simpler approaches to common tasks. Among the many improvements: You can fine-tune clips by using the composite trim preview, and with keyboard shortcuts you can adjust hot text values and create subsequences.

• Better audio workflow lets you better use the Premiere Pro audio tools giving you faster setup for voiceover recording, improved channel routing, enhanced multichannel audio export, and more.

Adobe After Effects CC 2015

After Effects CC is digital motion graphics and compositing software that is used by motion graphic designers, visual artists, and video editors. It can be used in both film and video post-production. It uses a system of layers organized on a timeline to create composites from still images and motion footage such as from video files.

What’s New in After Effects CC 2015

• Creative Cloud Libraries will allow you to share assets among team members, Adobe applications, and projects giving you more flexible collaborations as well as instant access to the things you need.

• Improved previews: With Uninterrupted Preview you can now adjust composition properties, such as resizing interface panels and viewing design iterations, all while letting playback continue.

• Face Tracker lets you track faces with very fine control of the level of tracking details. Basic tracking lets you blur out someone’s face, and more detailed tracking lets you track points on the face, such as eyes, to change the color, or track facial measurements to use in Adobe Character Animator.

• Enhanced user interface; Adapt the interface brightness to your liking, change the tab sizes in the multifunction panels, and more easily navigate, choose, and activate grouped panels.

• Optimization for touch control: Choose and activate panels using touch devices, making it easier to navigate between panels in a group.

Adobe Character Animator (Preview)

This is a new companion application to After Effects that lets you animate 2D characters. Set simple rigging controls and use your webcam to give characters created in Photoshop or Illustrator life.

How this works is that you use Photoshop or Illustrator to create multi-layered documents that represent you character. Character Animator uses your structure and layer names to automatically rig the puppet. Any changes in Photoshop or Illustrator will automatically update your project in Character Animator. Using a webcam, you track facial movement and control position, scale, rotation, and expressions on your character’s face – from your face.

You can automate the lips by talking into a microphone and using audio analysis to sync with mouth movements. You can trigger with your keyboard things like blinking, and automate breathing and other behaviors using automation.

You can also add secondary movement such as hair movement or flapping wings through physics-based animation effects such as Particles behavior. You can add snow to a scene or make any puppet become a particle for additional motions.

Finally you can record multiple performances each as a separate track to the Timeline panel and then trim and slip tracks to put together your best performance.

Adobe Project “Candy”

Project “Candy” is a new mobile application for capturing and modifying color dynamics on mobile devices. Then you can share those dynamics as Looks within Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Premiere Clip. These Looks work like filters to add color and character to your video projects.

First you use your mobile camera to capture lighting and/or color schemes wherever you are – a sunrise, a crisp autumn day, a foggy forest, or the decaying paint on an old red barn.

Once you have an image, Candy presents the colors as bubbles in a 3D space. Here you can adjust the hue, saturation, and lightness to your liking. Once you are satisfied, you can save the Look in your Personal Look library.

From there, you can copy the looks to your Creative Cloud library and use them with Premiere Pro, Premiere Clip, and After Effects.

Adobe Premiere Clip

Premiere Clip is a mobile app that lets you create videos right where your media is – on your mobile device. This means that you can take that video of your day at the lake, turn it into a movie right there on the spot, and share it with friends via messaging, email, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, or upload it to Creative Cloud and work with it in Premiere Pro CC from your desktop.

What’s New in Premiere Clip

• Improved integration with Premiere Pro: Being able to open Premiere Clip projects directly in Premiere Pro means you can seamlessly move from editing in your mobile application right into your professional desktop program.

• Custom Looks can now be applied using Project Candy by accessing them from your Creative Cloud libraries.

Adobe Audition CC 2015

Adobe Audition CC is the latest release of the comprehensive Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) production solution from Adobe Systems. It features a multi-track mix/edit environment that you can use to create your own music, record and mix a project, produce a radio spot, clean up audio, and compile and edit a soundtrack. In fact it is your own personal recording studio.

What’s New in Audition

• Dynamic Link video streaming lets you send video sequences from Premiere Pro directly into Audition and view the video immediately in its native format. This means that you do not have to wait for long conversions. Audition preserves the original resolution and frame rate and plays it without rendering. Any changes to the video in Premiere Pro are reflected in Audition.

• Live re-linking lets you replace a track with a new track with all of the processing done to the original remaining – levels, fades, EQ, and other settings. You can also swap one tune for another and keep the dynamics settings that make the music fit the action.

• Dual display video means that you can set the video on one screen and Audition’s controls on the other, providing much easier editing.

• Automated Workflows let you import Premiere Pro and Prelude markers and other XMP metadata to guide your audio edits in Audition. You can export markers from Audition for use in third-party applications. You can automatically collect and save copies of all associated files as well as back up your project to any location including your Creative Cloud folder.

Adobe Media Encoder CC 2015

Media Encoder optimizes video for delivery to every screen, resolution, and venue. Through tight integration with Premiere Pro and After Effects, you can achieve a smooth post-to-delivery workflow.

What’s New in Media Encoder CC 2015

• Time Tuner lets you adjust the duration of your content regardless of whether it is a bumper or long-form film. If you need a whole series of spots that are exactly 30 seconds long, or you need to reduce the viewing time of a project by two percent, or even fit a film into a 1:37:22 hour spec, Time Tuner will do this by removing or adding video frames imperceptibly.

• Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus support means you can create content with up to 5.1 or 7.1 channels respectively. You can now deliver surround sound in such a way that during playback the widely supported Dolby formats automatically reconfigure for the current playback system.

• QuickTime Channelization and rewrap provides the ability to Export multiple audio channel configurations in a single QuickTime file. You save time by rendering a QuickTime file that contains all of your required audio channel options in a single file.

• Enhanced format options allow rendering out a broad range of formats, now including the MXF-wrapped JPEG 2000 used for broadcast delivery and archiving.

Adobe Prelude CC 2015

Adobe Prelude CC provides a unified interface for ingesting and logging workflows. This way you can work faster, stay organized, and streamline your production process.

What’s New in Prelude CC 2015

• Record voice-overs with streamlined workflow for fast turnaround. Whether you want to add scratch narration to guide your edit in Premier Pro, or quickly create finished pieces, just create a rough cut, add an audio track, click the record button, and you are ready to go.

Adobe SpeedGrade CC 2015

Adobe SpeedGrade CC is a professional color grading application that can transform the visual part of your storytelling into something special. SpeedGrade, with the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, lets you add professional color correction and look design to your post-production workflow.

What’s new with SpeedGrade CC 2015

• Premiere Pro color tools compatibility lets you bring Premiere Pro projects into SpeedGrade via DirectLink while maintaining Lumetri Looks created in Premiere Pro. You can make other color-grading adjustments to your project, and any work completed will be directed back into the Premiere Pro project.

• Optimized scopes performance will show you the impact of your color grade adjustments in a more responsive manner.

• SpeedLooks will provide dramatic flair and emotional impact to your project by adding the new SpeedLook color grading presets to your sequences.

Creative Cloud Libraries

Creative Cloud Libraries now come to video, providing seamless workflows that simplify asset management and encourage creative collaboration. Access and share a common Library of assets when working with Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and other desktop Adobe tools. Maintain a pervasive repository of standardized graphics, Looks, and other assets for consistency and time-saving all through production, and across projects.

Adobe Anywhere for Teams and Enterprise

Adobe Anywhere brings collaborative editing and version control to a much wider audience. Now teams of all sizes will be able to collaborate using centralized media across any standard network.

The new single-location version of Anywhere brings to you a collaboration feature set that is designed for teams without remote editors. This new single-location solution supports both Creative Cloud for enterprise and Creative Cloud for teams.

The Collaboration Hub contains the project information and metadata database, and manages user access. Support for third-party hardware-based failover ensures redundancy that lets editors keep working without interruption during a system hardware failure.

As you can see, this edition of Adobe Creative Cloud for Video is chock full of goodies that will have you working with video and being creative for a long time to come. The major updates to Premiere Pro – Lumetri Color Panel, Morph Cut, and the enhanced collaboration capabilities – are great, as is the updated mobile integration.

After Effects’ improved previews, Face Tracker, and adaptable user interface are also good, and with the Character Animator as well, you really have a huge update. Project “Candy,” the Audition updates, and the updates to Prelude, Media Encoder, and SpeedGrade add more value. To top it off you have the Creative Cloud Libraries and Anywhere for teams. Altogether it’s a very loaded update this time around. Normally I would say I very highly recommend this upgrade, but if you have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, then you already have the upgrade.

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