This morning, Adobe released an update to its video suite of Creative Cloud software, including Premiere Pro and After Effects. The update brings Speech to Text capabilities in Premiere Pro, offering an automated workflow for creating transcriptions and captions.

The company also released full native support for Macs powered by M1 in Premiere Pro, Media Encoder and Character Animator. Within Premiere Pro, features like Auto Reframe and Scene Edit Detection are noticeably accelerated.

New in Premiere Pro

Speech to Text

Automatically generate a transcript and add captions to your videos to improve accessibility and boost engagement with Speech to Text. Instead of manually moving between applications and platforms, you can now complete everything inside Premiere Pro.

With support for 13 languages, Beta users around the world have confirmed the impressive accuracy of Speech to Text transcriptions. If changes are needed, such as the correct spelling of names, text edits are easily completed in the Text panel inside Premiere Pro. Once a transcription is ready, select Create Captions to bring your captions onto the Timeline. Customize the appearance of your captions using the design tools in the Essential Graphics panel.

Speech to Text is, on average, five times faster than other captioning workflows.

Transcript editing tools

Search your transcripts for specific words or phrases; click on a word in the Text panel to move the playhead to the corresponding position in the timeline. You can also export your transcript allows and generate an SRT or text file right from the Text panel. You can use the text files for proofreading, to share transcripts with clients, or to get a head start on written content.

Premiere Pro can automatically identify different speakers, simplifying reviewing and editing. You can also have Premiere Pro to display pauses as ellipses (…) so you can see where there are gaps in the dialog and navigate between them.

Generate captions automatically

Powered by Adobe Sensei, Speech to Text transform transcriptions into caption items on the timeline, leveraging machine learning to match the natural pacing of your dialog.

The Create captions dialog includes sliders for adjusting how captions are arranged, such as maximum number of characters per line and a dropdown menu for broadcast standard caption presets. If needed, you can save your own custom presets as well.

New titling and caption styling tools

Premiere Pro 15.4 offers even more tools for stylizing text and captions, including the ability to add multiple shadows to text layers, the ability to change attributes of text backgrounds and expanded font substitution with support for 28 different international alphabets.

Add multiple shadows to text layers

You can now stylize titles by adding drop shadows to individual text layers, similar to how you add strokes to a text layer.

Text background improvements

Change attributes of text backgrounds to make them part of your designs, including fills and adjustable rounded corners. Use Text Backgrounds with titles and captions, for example to make them more easily readable. Select the Background checkbox in the Essential Graphics panel to access text background options.

Expanded font substitution

Font substitution now supports 28 different alphabets. If the fonts are available on your system, Premiere Pro can substitute those fonts.

Upgrade Legacy Titles

Still working with Legacy Titles? Now you can convert them into Source Graphics within your Premiere Pro projects. Source Graphics are displayed in the Project panel, where you can track and sort them like any other project item. Upgrading Legacy Titles converts Legacy Title attributes, including text stylings, layer settings and track item filters.

Label colors and clip names

Working on Productions? You 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 on the Project panel. All users can now map a keyboard shortcut for easy toggling.

Colorized Vectorscope in Premiere Pro (Beta)

Color improvements

Tetrahedral LUT interpolation

Tetrahedral LUT interpolation in Premiere Pro offers more precise interpretation of color information for better consistency when grading footage with difficult lighting conditions, such as strong shadows and highlights in the same shot, and reducing the chances of introducing banding during post-production.

Colorized Vectorscope in Premiere Pro (Beta)

A new colorized vectorscope, providing more detailed image analysis for color grading in Premiere Pro is now available in public Beta.

Faster Team Projects

Team Projects is getting faster and more efficient, streamlining remote editing and production workflows.

Faster saving: Saving changes in Premiere Pro 15.4 is faster, thanks to optimizations to the Team Project file structure.

Progressive project loading (Beta) means you can start working sooner, thanks to intelligent loading that reduces Team Projects startup times from minutes to seconds.

Media relinking (Beta) allows you to relink your project files locally in Premiere Pro, without having to go through the Team Project Media Management panel. Premiere Pro (Beta) keeps everything organized and ensures that local media folders sync correctly with your shared Team Projects file.

Performance improvements

Faster Scene Edit Detection

Scene Edit Detection, powered by Adobe Sensei, is up to 2x faster on macOS and Windows and 3X faster on Apple M1 devices.

Automatic audio device switching

Creative Cloud video applications on Windows automatically switch when swapping out audio devices, such as interfaces, microphones, or headphones. The feature is already available on macOS. You can still manually set audio devices in Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Premiere Pro > Preferences (macOS).

Note: Device Switching is only enabled for MME audio driver support, and is not active when ASIO or WASAPI driver models are selected.

Discontinued CUDA and OpenCL support on macOS

With the latest release, support for CUDA and OpenCL graphics rendering on macOS is no longer included with the Adobe video and audio applications.

The Adobe video and audio team is focused on Apple Metal graphics for macOS, ensuring a stable and performant user experience for our applications on the Apple platform.

New in After Effects (Beta)

With Multi-Frame Rendering, the After Effects architecture is being modernized to take advantage of multi-core CPUs for up to 3x faster performance. The After Effects (Beta) has added Multi-Frame Rendering for Previews, providing faster on-screen rendering and an overall more responsive experience. In addition, with Speculative Rendering, After Effects automatically detects when your system is not active and uses that time to render compositions.