New features in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects at IBC 2024

Every year, Adobe presents new functions for its video products Premiere Pro and After Effects just in time for the IBC in Amsterdam. The most striking feature is the new, modern design of the interface for both programs. In addition to standardized shapes for interface elements and clean fonts, there are now two dark modes, a bright light mode and a high contrast mode for difficult visibility conditions. Adobe has also made sure that the interfaces feel a little more fluid overall (“improved snappiness”).

Adobe Premiere Pro – Color Management and Properties Window

As already mentioned, comprehensive color management will play a major role in Premiere Pro this year.

Adobe’s stated goal is to fully automatically adjust the colors of material from different cameras. In the best case scenario, users simply specify the desired working color space and Premiere Pro does the adjustment in the background.

Ideally, you should work in the new Wide Gamut Color Space, which corresponds to the industry standard ACEScct. Since this color space fully includes almost all common color spaces, Premiere can now automatically adjust recognized material in this color space. Anyone who wants more control or uses material from an unsupported manufacturer can still correct many parameters manually.

The second major change in Premiere concerns the workflow: A new Properties panel shows properties of one or more selected assets and can then be changed directly on the spot. If you have selected several clips, you can, for example, scale, crop or otherwise modify all of them with one setting. This could prove to be a real time saver in many workflows.

Adobe After Effects – 3D objects with embedded animation

There are improvements and extensions to report in the 3D working environment in After Effects. After the native import of 3D objects alongside 2D elements was recently introduced, After Effects now also supports embedded 3D animations for imported 3D models (GLB or GLTF). These can now be activated directly in the timeline as a property.

The new Shadow Catchers allow 3D objects to cast realistic shadows on video footage. These “color shadows” are intended to provide even more realism, since shadows in the real world are rarely just black or gray.

Depth mapping allows you to embed 3D elements into live-action footage even more realistically by estimating the depth information of clips.

In After Effects, the Properties panel has been expanded to directly control cameras and lights, making it easier to fine-tune designs. Last but not least, the integration of Substance 3D has become even more powerful, as the motion designer now makes over 20,000 fully licensed 3D models and materials usable in its own projects.

All new features are now available in the beta version of Premiere Pro and After Effects and should be available for download to all interested Creative Cloud users soon.