Even though I made a lot of videos about Premiere Pro features and how efficient you can be in that NLE, I made it obvious that there are things about Premiere that I don’t like at all.
Like for example, Markers panel experience. I also complained many times that they are not improving features they introduced a few years ago like, for example, the Team Projects workflow.
So I need to admit that I’m a bit surprised by July’s 2021 update. Not only it introduces some improvements to Team Projects but also "kills" a whole market of third-party audio transcription services.
We already knew S2T is coming to Premiere within its new Text panel. I actually had early access to that feature and I already used it on a few projects I worked on (for example Jim Cummings interview).
What we did not know, however, is if it’s gonna be a paid-on-top feature and on what terms. And I’m just super excited that it’s free as a part of the Creative Cloud subscription.
So now Adobe will brag in press with headlines like Premiere Pro: The Only NLE with Auto Captioning. I can’t blame them though. It is an unfair advantage they should use in their marketing. No questions asked.
If you’d ask me a few months ago what is the way to go for timecode-based transcribe you can use for editing, I’d say Transcriptive 2.0 from Digital Anarchy.
Now I’m not even considering it as an option. It’s always better to use native tools instead of a third party for stability and support reasons alone. And now it’s even cheaper because Transcriptive has a pay-as-you-go pricing model on top of the one-time payment for the software.
With the new Text panel, it becomes the most powerful captioning tool on the market. We can save styles of captions to reuse in the future, we have an option to name speakers in a transcript, display pauses as [...] in the transcript if you need that indication and so many more.
As a reminder, here’s a video about the Text panel I did a few months ago:
We can also adjust and quickly update captioning Track Style by using the Push Style Attributes button. We can either choose to update ‘All captions on track’ or ‘Style in project’.
I’m also very pleased to see that they have added a few improvements to the Text panel since the previous release.
When we create captions or subtitles we can now customize such parameters as:
- Maximum length in characters,
- Minimum duration in seconds,
- Gap between captions (frames),
- Lines (Single\Double).
That’s a lot of control over how the end result will look like.
So why is this feature such a deal-breaker?
Because there are projects, especially in the non-scripted world, that benefit greatly from the searchability factor.
Searchability is a topic I discuss in one of the Editing Chef lessons. It has a tremendous impact on how efficient you can be with your edits. And if productive editing sessions are something you care strongly about, check out my course. You may find it interesting.
Finally M1 support! For all of you who deal with a non-optimized version of Premiere on your brand new Mac, it’s probably equally exciting news.
Adobe claims that it makes editing on average 77% faster. Not bad. I wouldn’t say no to such a number. I’m a bit jealous 😉
We can now customize label colors and clip names on the timeline with the option of having that change made to the source media label colors and clip names in the Project panel. It’s a new addition to Productions workflow bur for regular project files we can now map a keyboard shortcut to that command.
You may know that I love using labels in my workflows. With that new option, I might need to update the video I started the CTTP channel with 😉
Adobe keeps making the Essential Graphics panel better. With this release, we get
- support for multiple shadows for text layers,
- text background improvements,
- and expanded font substitution.
We also get a new command to Upgrade Legacy Titles. If you happen to work on old projects or just updated to CC from the standalone version, you’ll probably appreciate it.
Sounds like black magic (well sorry for that reference) but basically it means that LUT support will be better in Lumetri Color. No more bending on gradients. If you want to understand what it’s about a bit more, have a look here.
Adobe’s tool for detecting edit cuts is supposed to be up to 2x faster across Windows and macOS. And almost 3x faster on Apple M1 chips. If it’s true then it might be as fast as Resolve even for long clips.
And in case you missed my video about that feature:
All video apps will now automatically switch audio devices that were swapped out. No more going back and forth to Preferences when connecting a microphone or headphones.
Note: Device Switching is only enabled for MME audio driver support, and is not active when ASIO or WASAPI driver models are selected.
We finally have some updates to the Team Projects workflow! I use it quite often so that’s great news to me. The first update is about faster saving and it’s rolled out already.
And we have two updates in the Public Beta version of Premiere.
The first one is intelligent loading that reduces startup times from minutes to seconds.
And the second one, which is very awaited by me, is media relinking without having to go through the Team Project Media Management window. It makes the relinking process so much faster and more convenient with the search button from the regular project workflow.
A new colorized vectorscope is supposed to provide a more detailed image analysis for color grading in Premiere Pro.
Such a good release! One of those you really don’t want to postpone.
I’d argue that you still need to be super careful when updating, especially if you’re in the middle of an important project with a tight deadline. But I imagine that the S2T feature will convince a lot of editors to update to the latest version.
As a reminder, if you’re using something like Premiere 14.9, you can actually install 15.4 alongside it.
Let me know how you feel about July’s Premiere Pro release. What are the features or improvements you’re waiting for the most?
And if you struggle with Premiere Pro stability or want to master Pancake Timelines editing, have a look at my Bulletproof Premiere Pro eBook and this Pancake micro-course with exercise files.
