Thursday, December 3rd, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe ships After Effects and Premiere Pro 2015.1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BCKyTXejw

Originally posted on 10 September 2015. Scroll down for news of the official releases.

Adobe has released sneak peeks at the next updates to its professional video tools, including After Effects CC and Premiere Pro CC, including improved support for UltraHD workflows and gesture controls.

The updates – which, if Adobe sticks to the same numbering convention as previous years, will be After Effects CC 2015.1 and Premiere Pro CC 2015.1 – will be showcased at IBC 2015.

First up, Premiere Pro 2015.1. The release will extend the software’s UltraHD workflows, with native support for the DNxHR and HEVC (h.265) codecs, designed for footage with resolutions up to 4K and 8K, respectively.

It also adds what Adobe describes as “initial support” for HDR workflows, including native support for the OpenEXR file format, and “powerful and intuitive” HDR editing controls.

In practice, that seems to translate to a HDR Specular slider and an HDR Specular colour wheel in the new Lumetri Color panel, as shown in this video

If you’re working on a Windows 8 tablet or using an Apple track pad, the update also introduces a range of new touch and gestural controls.

These include touch controls to mark in and out points, trim or scrub through clips, or drag clips into a sequence; and to pinch to zoom in the Assembly workspace.

The UI has also been overhauled to work better on small screens like tablets, including the option to stack panels into groups and tap to switch between them.

Other new features include GPU-accelerated optical flow time remapping for retiming footage – previously the preserve of third-party tools like Twixtor – and workflow tweaks when using the built-in Adobe Stock service.

New in After Effects CC 2015.1: extended UltraHD and gesture support, updated previews
The new features in After Effects CC 2015.1 run along the same lines: support for the HEVX and DNxHR codecs, and a similar set of touch and gesture controls to Premiere Pro.

In addition, there is now a new Lumetri Color effect so that grading work done in Premiere Pro 2015’s new Lumetri Color panel is preserved when importing clips or projects into After Effects.

There are also a number of changes to the way After Effects previews your work, following the debacle with the new uninterrupted preview functionality earlier this year.

The update doesn’t seem restore the features that had to be disabled in the original 2015 release while the software’s core code is being rewritten, but it does make previews more user-configurable.

New options include the ability to play any combination of video, audio and overlays during previews, and new playback range options, including Play Around Current Time.

There are also a range of smaller new features, including new Cycore effects, which you can read about on Adobe’s blog.

Updated 3 December: After Effects CC and Premiere Pro CC 2015.1 are now available. (On its blog, Adobe refers to the After Effects update as CC 2015 13.6, but everything else is officially 2015.1.)

In addition to the new features listed above, Adobe has released Preview 3 of Character Animator, the work-in-progress 2D animation tool installed alongside After Effects since the original CC 2015 release.

There are a number of additions, but the main one is the new Stick tool, which lets users define rigid segments on the puppet mesh, enabling them to set up a virtual armature for a character’s arms and legs.

Both applications are only available via a subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. New subscriptions cost $19.99/month for AE or Premiere Pro alone; complete subscriptions start at $49.99/month.

Read more about the new features in Premiere Pro CC 2015.1 on Adobe’s blog

Read more about the new features in After Effects CC 2015.1 on Adobe’s blog

Read more about the other updates to Adobe’s professional video tools
(Includes Audition CC and Media Encoder CC)