As filmmakers flock to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, 85% of premieres were created using Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe continues to enhance the workflows that editors rely on to bring stories to screen. Today’s updates to Premiere and After Effects build on that important role, giving editors and motion designers a faster, more intuitive way to work while maintaining creative flow and intent. AI-powered object masks in Premiere make it easier than ever to create, adjust, and track precise masks for complex moving subjects with just a hover and click, and redesigned shape masks that track up to 20x faster turn masking into a creative superpower. Importing the new Firefly Board into Premiere also made storyboarding, filling in B-roll gaps, and collaborating on new concepts even more efficient. Build, animate, and refine your work faster and with more control with new motion design features and performance improvements across After Effects.
These updates open up entirely new ways to tell more powerful stories with effects, including relighting your subject, blurring the background, separating color grades, and designing custom effects in seconds. And masks are faster, more flexible, and more precise, so they become a building block of your creativity rather than an obstacle to your flow, especially when used with the 90+ effects, transitions, and animations recently added to Premiere.
Plus, see all the new features in Premiere and After Effects.
Create the perfect mask for complex moving objects with just a hover and click.
Creating the perfect mask for complex moving subjects has never been easier with new AI-powered object masks. Just hover and click to generate accurate masks in seconds. And with color visual overlays, powerful mask adjustment tools, and fast tracking, creating your own effects is more efficient and fun than ever.
Quickly create object masks from the toolbar to easily mask and track people and objects as they move through your clip. As you move your mouse over the frame, a visual overlay snaps into place to identify the person or object you want to mask. You can preview your object mask by choosing from six different colored overlays or a black and white alpha view.
Additionally, you can add or remove areas from object masks using fast lasso and rectangle editing tools, and easily adjust masks using feathering and resizing controls. Feather and Expand controls let you soften and resize the object mask for the perfect fit. Bottom line: Less fiddling and more creativity.
Object Mask uses Adobe’s new assistive AI model. It’s completely on-device. Also, like all Adobe AI tools and models, we do not use customer data for training.
Style your videos with redesigned shape masks for faster tracking
The shape masks you’ve been using for years are now even better with Premiere. Redesigned ellipse, rectangle, and pen masks give you more creative control, allowing you to manipulate effects like blurring faces, relighting sections of the frame, and more. And with up to 20x faster tracking than previous versions of Premiere, you’ll spend less time checking the status bar.
Like object masks, you can now generate shape masks directly from the toolbar, making creating shape masks easier and faster. Resize, move, rotate, and blur your masks with improved creative controls in the Program Monitor for greater precision and flexibility. Redesigned Bezier curves make mask customization smoother, and the option to select colored overlays allows you to preview your masks effectively. You can add, subtract, and mix multiple masks using different blending modes, increasing your creative possibilities.
Bi-directional tracking allows you to find the perfect starting frame to track forward and backward with just one click. And with 3D perspective tracking, you can anchor your mask to a screen, wall, rotating surface, or whatever surface you want. You can also see exactly how fast the mask is tracking in frames per second.
Community feedback asked for live tracking preview. Delivered. Observe the regeneration of the mask during tracking to visually identify areas that may require additional adjustments after tracking is complete.
Sometimes the truck largely Perfect, but needs some adjustments. The new “Frame” track editing mode eliminates the need to manually adjust all tracked keyframes. Just make your changes, and Premiere easily combines your corrections with tracked keyframes, reducing dozens of manual adjustments to just a few.
Firefly Boards is an AI-first space where you can explore, iterate, and collaborate in real-time. In pre-production, Board’s ideation tools make it easy to find and communicate the right visual style and structure. Generate assets for pitches, treatments, and storyboards without leaving your board. Post-production allows you to lay out scenes and ideas to better understand what you’ve shot. And if you find that certain shots are missing, or you want to experiment with effects, you can generate media directly within the context of your project.
With this update, you can now easily get media from Firefly Boards to Premiere. With just a click, one or more assets will be sent directly to your current Premiere project. Premiere lets you seamlessly blend generated assets into your projects using all the professional editing tools you’re used to.
A new Frame.io V4 panel has been added within Premiere (Beta).
Collaboration has been significantly upgraded. The new Frame.io V4 panel allows you to continue editing while capturing comments, media, and version control. Bring in assets, share cuts, and sync notes without leaving Premiere.
Need to export your sequences? Versions are automatically stacked in Frame.io. Feedback will appear on your timeline. Notes remain intact even if you continue editing. This creates a smoother loop between you and your team. Yes, Frame.io is included in Creative Cloud at no additional charge.
Get your Adobe Stock license without any detours
Need footage to fill in the gaps? Adobe Stock is now more fully integrated within Premiere than ever before. Browse over 52 million clips (including 92,000,000 free clips), preview, license, and import without losing focus.
In addition to all these new innovations coming to Premiere, After Effects 26.0 brings exciting new creative possibilities to motion designers and visual storytellers. It’s excited to announce one of its biggest updates.
Enhanced vector workflow in After Effects
Vector workflows in After Effects are now smoother than ever. You can now import SVG files, a common file type used by graphic designers in Adobe Illustrator, as native shape layers and start animating in full vector fidelity. When you convert an Illustrator layer to a shape layer, its gradients and transparency are preserved and editable, so you can keyframe color transitions and animate gradient motion. Also, new gradient scale and rotation properties give you more creative control over fills and strokes.
Creating native 3D parametric meshes
Design in 3D with parametric meshes that you can create from scratch within After Effects. You can build and customize cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, toruses, and planes. Assemble shapes like building blocks to create stylized graphics and photorealistic set pieces. Additionally, new spot shadows and parallel shadows improve scene realism and dynamics.
Style your scene with over 1,300 free Substance 3D materials
With just a few clicks, you can now access and apply Substance 3D materials to both native meshes and imported models to add depth and realism to your models. These materials are dynamic and customizable, allowing you to fine-tune them to fit your vision. After Effects has access to thousands of materials through Substance Community Assets, with over 1,300 free materials available to all users. Use offset, rotation, and scale controls to get the look you want, and animate material properties to bring it to life.
Upgraded motion typography with variable fonts
Motion typography in After Effects has received a major upgrade. With Text Animator, you can now animate all axes that variable fonts expose with keyframes and expressions. Adjust weight, width, skew, wiggle, and designer-defined font axes in the Properties panel, and work with flexible titles and templates through the Essential Graphics panel and Motion Graphics templates.
Maintaining flow improves quality of life
Sometimes, small updates can have a big impact on your work. The new Unmult effect quickly composites footage with solid black or white backgrounds by removing pixels based on a brightness threshold, making it easy to key complex clips with fire or smoke. You now have access to three new audio effects: Gate, Compressor, and Distortion. Easily clean up and shape sounds without leaving After Effects. High-performance preview playback is faster than ever by extending the preview period, while using significantly less disk space without compromising visual fidelity. Additionally, native WinARM support improves performance on next-generation PCs. To find your settings, we’ve reorganized Preferences to give you quick access to comp and project settings, and we’ve made it easier to reference keyframes in expressions.
The new Adobe Premiere and After Effects 26.0 is available starting today. Be sure to visit your Creative Cloud apps and prepare for updates.
