Major updates to Adobe Premiere and After Effects streamline advanced video editing workflows with new tools and AI

With 85% of Sundance filmmakers using Adobe Creative Cloud tools, what better time than the week of Sundance for Adobe to announce major new updates to Premiere and After Effects? That’s right, the bastion of independent filmmaking opens Thursday, and Adobe is a recurring theme in the filmmaker’s work.

The creative software giant’s wide-ranging update is designed to make post-production faster and more intuitive with, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. At the top of the pack is Premiere’s new AI-powered object mask that makes Photoshop’s Magic Wand tool blush. This feature was in public beta and is now available to all Premiere users.

With the tool selected, simply hover your mouse over the scene in question and a colored overlay will instantly highlight individual objects and people. What’s even more impressive is that the selected mask will track the moving subject. Of course, perfection isn’t always guaranteed. So you can also use the fast lasso and rectangle editing tools to refine your selection. However, if you’ve ever spent any time rotoscoping, you know that this is a tool that has the potential to dramatically speed up your workflow.

Adobe has also redesigned shape masks in Premiere so that ellipses, rectangles, and pens can all be manipulated with effects like blur and relighting. Adobe also rates these tools to be 20 times faster at tracking than previous versions of the software. These can be added, resized, moved, rotated, and blurred from the toolbar, and Adobe says Bezier curves have been redesigned for smoother customization. Importantly, you can mix multiple masks with different blend modes.

And in fact, during the demo, I got to see Adobe’s Jason Druss use a combination of shape masks and object masks to quickly color grade a sky while removing two subjects’ faces that invaded the original mask. he said as he cut out his fanny pack and animated it with a new motion camera transition that flew towards the screen. “Not only does the fanny pack come out, but you can see the motion blur that’s added to it (…) You have to be a really, really advanced video editor if you want to pull off something like this.”