Adobe has released a new version of its Creative Cloud video and audio tools, dubbed Creative Cloud 2015.3 (not Creative Cloud 2016). Here’s a roundup of summary info, links to more, and videos from Adobe and 3rd party reviewers & trainers.
Some users may need to be patient: it sometimes takes hours for the updates to rollout throughout the entire user base. Direct download links are not currently available. Adobe is using new installer technology, which will install 2015.3 alongside the previous version, so you probably should choose to deselect “Remove Old Versions” in the Creative Cloud app (in Advanced Options when you click Install). The new installer should complete faster, and was supposed to be able to install multiple CC apps at once (that doesn’t appear to happen though).
Migrating plug-ins between versions can be a problem, depending on plug-in tech used, but copying the old folder over to the new version plug-in folder often works fine. Just be sure to copy the folder before you uninstall the old version, which is the default behavior (as mentioned above).
Below is Adobe intro videos and an outline of feature highlights of this release. There’s sometimes more specific info linked to in Adobe Premiere Pro Help / New features summary, and related Help sections (links below), but Help doesn’t include video or 3rd-party information. Note also other CC apps were also updated but not always in full force this round; see the very cool new features in Photoshop at the bottom of this page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwPNP948SE
Adobe also has a introductory overview video of Creative Cloud video tools at Use the Adobe Creative Cloud video tools together by Maxim Jago.
Note that on June 21st through the 23rd, Adobe has invited artists to live stream Creative Cloud demos on the Adobe Twitch Channel. Spanning four creative fields – Graphic Design, UX Design, Illustration and Video – featured guests will show off their favorite techniques and answer questions live. Each day from 3pm to 5pm, there is planned Live Video Editing with Jason Levine and Michael Chaize.
Beginning at 9am PT (Pacific Time) on Tuesday, June 21st, Adobe is streaming until 6pm each day through Thursday. At any point throughout these three days, you can actively participate in the Online Creative Jam and get a chance to win prizes.
There’s a similar CC Dojo event for Japanese users.
Premiere Pro (10.3) and Adobe Media Encoder (more at team blog and Premiere Pro Help)
- Proxy workflows (video) in Premiere Pro CC and Adobe Media Encoder CC help editors work with heavy 8K, HDR and HFR media even on lighter weight machines like laptops. Or editors can switch seamlessly to native high-resolution formats up to 8K—such as RED Weapon—or with a new workflow that creates lightweight proxies at ingest (AME video). Paul Del Vecchio noted that you can copy to a specific location upon import.
https://youtu.be/G8a1G1YkNDg?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
- Premiere Pro CC will add new virtual reality VR capabilities (video), which can be interpreted immediately by YouTube and other sources. Tim Dashwood noted: “This first effort by Adobe is currently only useful for previewing your equirectangular footage at any field of view or orientation, but not keyraming or exporting a ‘pan & scan’ version. You will still require the HMD Preview plug-in in 360VR Toolbox or 360VR Express to do that.” Tim Dashwood put features and shortcomings in context in his helpful video below.
- Mettle also has a bunch of info on VR, and not all using their SkyBox360 AE Premiere plug-in – which was demoed by Adobe’s Dave Helmly at 22:22 in the video at the bottom of this section.
- Alex Pearce posted an actual 360VR video (view in Google Chrome), Premiere Pro VR tools in latest update.
https://youtu.be/u1eUb0OiBxU?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gfTgWq2kSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMeIgJefPvk
- Edit immediately during ingest (video) means that Premiere Pro CC users can use the files immediately while complete import of video and audio files finishes in the background. Users can also switch between native and proxy formats freely when using multiple devices. With initial support for Apple Metal and H.264 hardware decoding (Windows Intel Iris only), you get better performance. Export enhancements would be even more welcome, as Apple Final Cut Pro X has been killing Premiere in tracking and encoding speed.
- Better Captioning and Titling Options include new support for creating and editing open captions including font, color, size, and text positioning. Expanded titling now includes more languages and in their native alphabets, including RTL Arabic and Hebrew support (video by Eran Stern).
- Improvements have ben made to Media Encoder, with media browser previews, ingest preset, proxy management, export to Twitter, export from Character Animator and Audition to AME.
https://youtu.be/G6aBANZu8ms?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
- Enhanced Lumetri Color tools (video) within Premiere Pro CC adds HSL Secondaries (yay!) to expand the editor’s toolkit for making color correction easier for all. There’s an Auto White Balance feature and support for color Tangent control surfaces inside Premiere Pro, as explained by Robbie Carman in the 2nd video below (and in Help) — as well as enhancements to Lumetri Scopes and an included SpeedLooks look bundle.
https://youtu.be/iYaTWlKM23w?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
https://youtu.be/CH17agAu2es?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
Scott Simmons notes, “Super thin tracks” and “New in the @AdobePRE 2015.3 update – FCP XML Time Remapping Support now supports import of Speed ramps & exporting same to Final Cut Pro XML”. See his earlier look at the release from after NAB, A Closer Look At What’s Coming In The Next Update To Adobe Premiere Pro and the newer Kicking the tires on Proxy Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015.3.
Josh at Retooled.net has a nice take on this release, covering some handy smaller features and notes on newly “obsolete” effects.
https://youtu.be/3JVDMt3lPlo
Adobe’s Dave Helmly added a complete demo, Adobe Premiere Pro CC June 2016 Update (v2015.3).
https://youtu.be/Y9EJjqVV41o
After Effects (13.8) (more at team blog and Help)
- Performance improvements (video), like the new video and audio preview architecture in After Effects CC, deliver playback of cached frames for a smoother experience. You may see overall efficiency improvements when interacting with the application, while a select few (eg, Lumetri) GPU-accelerated effects deliver faster renders (must enable GPU-effects in PROJECT SETTINGS). The full story of the 2-year re-architecture and associated snafus has yet to be written (early 2014 AE team proposal)!
https://youtu.be/AKVB7vj7G3g?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
- Cinema 4D Exporter Improvements (video) allow you to transition a project from After Effects CC to Maxon Cinema 4D with new export options. Animated 3D text and shape layers can now be saved directly into the Cinema 4D file format. Add some depth and customizations to your text and shapes in Cinema 4D, and changes are automatically updated in After Effects for a roundtrip 3D motion graphics workflow.
https://youtu.be/mfrk2ps9CO4?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq2hpuHQgGU
Other improvements include: Faster image sequence import, Improved Creative Cloud Libraries and Stock experience, Improved Cache Before Playback, Auto-save while starting render queue. Also, Apple ProRes QuickTime files can be decoded on Windows without needing QuickTime installed on the system. RED camera raw file decoding now supports RED Scarlet-W, Raven, and Weapon cameras, including 8K .r3d footage.
With Todd Kopriva now gone after some years, info on many smaller improvement and bug fixes is MIA, though perhaps forthcoming on the team blog. There is at least one known bug for users of After Effects Text Templates, according to Joost van der Hoeven. Other reports include problems with missing LUTs & syncing, and sudden hard rebooting of a Hackintosh (regular Macs can use the OS X default display driver, not the recent Nvidia one, if they experience this).
Motionworks looked at the April NAB preview of this release a few months ago, AE CC 13.5, in After Effects 3D Enhancements. Otherwise, all the usual AE heavywieghts and regular supporters are not reporting on this release so far — though there is a single new video by “Zola,” on 3D and Cineware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0HV8Nc0l78
Character Animator (see more at team blog and Help)
- Easier and more efficient Character Animator (video) includes a simplified puppet creation process that enables users to easily tag puppet layers and record multiple takes of a character’s movement. Users can animate puppets to respond to motion and trigger animation accordingly.
https://youtu.be/FAMahOARAkM?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
Audition CC (9.2) (see more at the team blog and in Help)
- The new Essential Sound panel (video) in Audition CC enables novices to mix audio content with better results in a single panel. Modeled after the Lumetri Color panel in Premiere Pro, the Essential Sound panel provides simple controls to unify volume levels, repair sound, improve clarity, and help your video projects sound like they were mixed by an audio engineer.
https://youtu.be/Jh4QDECMpNc?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
- Also new in Audition, Direct Export with Adobe Media Encoder (video) enables you to export video projects with finished audio directly with Adobe Media Encoder, saving the trip back to Premiere Pro. All formats and presets are available, including formats which support re-wrap to minimize re-encoding video. Get full control over audio channel streams for multichannel audio formats, such as MXF, ensuring compatibility with your workflows and standards.
https://youtu.be/CktxPO2csfM?list=PLD8AMy73ZVxUBSG4bC8WpleuB6yJhPZMh
Adobe Stock (see Adobe Stock site)
- Quickly find Adobe Stock assets (video) with new filtered search in Creative Cloud Libraries. Licensed assets in your library are now badged for easy identification, videos are displayed with duration and format information, and saved videos are linked to video previews on the Adobe Stock site. Adobe Stock will have enhanced connections with CC apps and new workflows to enable Adobe Bridge and Lightroom users to contribute to the Adobe Stock marketplace directly from within the application.
- Introducing the Adobe Stock Premium Collection, a highly curated collection of nearly 100,000 hand selected images sourced from some of the world’s leading photographers and agencies.
https://youtu.be/RUqTnmBJNQo
https://youtu.be/zyj2kqU_OhM
Premiere Clip for iOS and Android
Adobe posted info in Update: See What’s New in the Latest Release of Premiere Clip for iOS and Android!
Photoshop (17.0)
Users should enjoy several exciting new features and performance improvements with this release, listed as 2015.5. There’s much more at Jeff Cranberry’s Adobe blog and at the Adobe’s Photoshop blog.
- Content-Aware Crop – When rotating or expanding an image beyond its original size using the Crop tool, sometimes you end up with image gaps around the edges. Content-Aware Crop addresses this by intelligently filling in the resulting gaps in an instant.
- Face-Aware Liquify automatically detects faces and their components in an image, and then makes it simple to quickly adjust eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features, allowing users to create artistic facial effects easily.
- Match Font, is an innovative new font recognition technology previewed at Adobe MAX 2015 and is included in this release. Match Font scans an image, recognizes text within the image, and then identifies matching or similar fonts based on fonts you have access to, either locally on your machine or through Creative Cloud.
- Also introduced are new Performance Enhancements in Photoshop, including a 4x performance improvement when working with font menus and the Content-Aware Fill feature.
Julieanne Kost posted several video, including 5 Hidden Gems in Photoshop CC (15.5) and Content Aware Crop.
https://youtu.be/tvGKut9yG-M
https://youtu.be/Lqwf-3Wux0g
Scott Kelby shared Photoshop 2015.5’s New Built-in Type Recognition Feature.
https://youtu.be/yxLoh1wQWHw
Photoshopcafe posted Face Aware Liquify In Photoshop Cc Tutorial.
https://youtu.be/wEg3pGjmULg
Here’s a 25 minute overview from the Photoshop Training Channel by Jesús Ramirez.
https://youtu.be/a1OUsl3-loo
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