Adobe has announced a host of updates to its Creative Cloud apps including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Premiere Rush, as well as new integration abilities that allow the various apps to work in tandem.  You can now add stock music, VFX, and shots within the Premiere Pro app, and test them in your timeline before ever worrying about licensing the material.

• With thousands of high-quality royalty-free music tracks available, you never have to leave your editing space to find the right soundtrack for your stories. Search for suitable music based on mood, genre, tempo, and duration.
• Preview — Use Timeline Sync to try different music tracks together with your edit. Built into the Essential Sound Panel, Timeline Sync allows you to test multiple music selections back-to-back, in sync with your edit in the timeline.
• Edit — Build your story with the music, without distracting audio watermarks. You can complete an entire edit and mix with unwatermarked preview audio files. Only license the music you want to use, after you are completely satisfied with the result.
• License — License music tracks directly inside the Essential Sound panel or from the Project panel. Licensed audio automatically replaces preview files with the high-quality version throughout your edit.

Most of these updates are a product of Adobe’s AI platform known as Sensei.  In addition to bringing more AI smarts to its applications, the updates also include many new workflow enhancement and performance improvements.  For example, a new Premiere Pro feature is Scene Edit Detection that can automatically analyze video files and add cuts or markers whenever there is a scene change.  Photoshop features include a new smart tool for improved “select subject” to help isolate faces, for example. This can save a significant amount of time creating mattes and building composite images.

Among the new smart tools coming to Adobe’s mobile device editing platform, Premiere Rush has the ability to Auto Reframe as well as Pan and Zoom, all while allowing a significant amount of control as needed.  Automatically reframe clips as AI identifies the point of interest in the frame and tracks it throughout the reframed video keeping the object/main action in the frame.  It can also make adjusting the aspect ratios of your videos quick and simple when switching between landscape, square, vertical, 4×5, 9×16, and more.

Premiere Rush will have its own Effects Panel which will also have the ability to bring still photos to life with Pan and Zoom, (sometimes known as the “Ken Burns effect”) to add motion to static images by changing the scale and position of the image over time. Set the focus of your frames, then drag a box to where you want the clip to land on the image. You can set in and out points of the animation. Positioning the Pan and Zoom effects to help direct the viewer’s attention to the particular parts of the image. There are also many other updates through the Creative Cloud suite for workflow improvements and, as usual, if you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, you’ll automatically get access to these new features once you install the latest updates.