Adobe Brings about Significant Changes to an Almost Perfect CC Lineup

NAB show started way back in 1923, about 96 years ago. Held at the Las Vegas Convention centre, it is the go-to convention for everything related to Media. All the big names such as Adobe showcase their new products during this event. This year’s show happens to be right around the corner. With two days left until the event, Adobe has announced a couple of incremental updates. While updates like this will be announced at the event, Adobe took the initiative to start off a day early. The updates in question are for the Premiere ProAfter EffectsAudition and Character Animator. Apart from incremental stuff like better codec and improved render times, they have included a couple of useful features.

Starting off with Premiere Pro, Adobe has included a new layout system for the project panel. Users can now arrange their media according to the project’s requirement. Extending this to After Effects, both the platforms can now share this, working in tandem. Another issue that quite a lot of Premiere users can relate to is audio and text placement. Adobe was keen to include rulers and auto detection which allows for more accurate results. Apart from that, encoding for H.265 and HEVC would be improved. Now if you’re wondering what that means, it basically will result in better loading times and real-time scribbling through the project.

Heading over to the After Effects side now. After Effects has always been considered as the photoshop of the video world. Even Mac users would have to agree that while their FCPX is superior to Premiere in some ways, they have nothing to compete with Adobe’s fine After Effects. Making it quite the industry benchmark. While it is all that perfect, Adobe continues to add more features to it. The latest one is the Content-Aware fill tool. It would allow, like in Photoshop, to remove objects in a frame. While that does not sound all that impressive, the software works to keep the entire video that way, judging from that frame. CRAZY! Adobe, while pioneering their Photoshop, have the advantage to play around with other products in a similar manner… Read More

Adobe Announces Updates for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator

Ahead of the annual NAB media show, which kicks off on April 6, Adobe is launching its traditional spring update with new updates for Creative Cloud apps including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator.

As always, Adobe’s updates bring performance improvements, new features, and improved efficiency for its video and audio tools.

In After Effects, there’s a new Content-Aware Fill feature for video, which is a neat option that works just like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop. You can select an object that you want to remove in a video and use Content-Aware Fill, powered by Adobe Sensei, to remove it.

Using Content-Aware Fill, you can remove logos, shadows, mics, and other objects from videos. Using Content-Aware Fill, you can remove logos, shadows, mics, and other objects from videos.

There’s a new Freeform Project panel in Premiere Pro that’s designed to allow you to arrange your video clips into select shots so you can build out and visualize a project to come up with new ideas.

Aligning text and graphics in Premiere Pro is easier through Rulers and Guides, and Guide Templates can be shared between After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Premiere Pro is also gaining Faster Mark Tracking, which Adobe says will bring more efficient color and effects workflows. Encoding for H.264 and HEVC has been improved for smoother playback in both Premiere Pro and After Effects.

For advanced users, After Effects has a new Expressions Editor for navigating through code visually with features that include … Read more

Hands On With Adobe’s New Content-Aware Tools for Video, Other NAB Updates

The annual NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) event is traditionally a showcase for new high-end video and audio editing features, and this year is no exception. Adobe has rolled out a host of new features and performance tweaks to its Creative Suite tools — particularly Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator. Not to be left out Cyberlink is also rolling out updates to PhotoDirector and PowerDirector for subscribers to its 365 Suite. For those who still think of video production as a niche market, Adobe projects that there will be nearly 605 billion minutes of video created every week by 2021. Of course, as anyone on YouTube knows, most of that will unfortunately never be edited, but it still leaves a huge amount that will be.

Content-Aware Fill for Video

The ability to plausibly fill in erased areas by using content-aware tools has been one of the most-impressive new photo editing technologies of the last decade. Now, Adobe has brought that same capability to video. Intuitively, that is a harder problem and certainly requires more processing power. However, video does have one natural advantage. Since there are typically many frames of the same scene, if you are trying to remove an offending object that is moving across the scene, the application can look at a variety of frames to see what the occluded background should be in other frames. Of course, that still means there is a need for plenty of advanced algorithms to get the color blending and lighting right.

There isn’t a lot of documentation out yet on how to use the new Content-Aware Fill in After Effects, but basically, it takes a few steps. First, you create a mask around the element you want to remove and then Track it as the object you want to remove moves, making sure the mask moves to follow the object. If the Mask doesn’t need to change shape, then AE’s automatic mask tracking works pretty well. Finally, you can choose to Content-Aware Fill using one of three modes. Object is the most sophisticated, and attempts to isolate and replace an object within the mask. Edge Blending gives you the sort of blur you see when faces or license plates are obscured in videos. Surface is the simplest and is designed to fill from solid surfaces under the section being replaced (like removing logos from the back of a laptop). The only other setting is choosing whether you want to fill the entire comp or just the work area.

Using Content-Aware Fill in After Effects is easy once you get the hang of it

Using Content-Aware Fill in After Effects is easy once you get the hang of it

Once I got the hang of the workflow, the process was pretty straightforward. It does lean much more on the CPU than the GPU, which is a little surprising given how good GPUs are at most of the needed tasks, so it can take a while. The fill is accomplished with an overlay of PNG files, so it can also consume quite a bit of disk space if you have a high-resolution video or are filling a long clip. As a simple example, here is some 4K drone footage I edited to remove our tracking vehicle for part of the shot (from about 7 seconds in to 18 seconds):

… read more