Adobe is launching Premiere Clip, a new iOS app with a simplified editorial interface for kickstarting a Premiere project, as part of today's extensive revamp of mobile apps that offer robust interoperability with its Creative Cloud desktop applications.

Available today in addition to Premiere Clip are Illustrator Line (a rebranded version of Adobe's earlier Line app) and Illustrator Draw (formerly Adobe Ideas), Photoshop Sketch (formerly just Sketch), Photoshop Mix (now for iPhone as well as iPad) and Lightroom Mobile, and three "capture apps": Brush, Shape and Color. The apps are built using Adobe's new Creative SDK, which defines the ways that mobile apps can interface with Creative Cloud.

"Premiere Clip is our first mobile video-editing application that works on iPhone and iPad, that takes the power of Premiere Pro and makes it available on mobile and also integrates back with the desktop," said Scott Morris, Adobe's Senior Marketing Director for Creative Cloud. "You can grab video clips and still images, drag and drop them into the order you like, trim out the bits you don't want, add visual polish with cinema-quality color treatments leveraging SpeedGrade technology and slow-motion effects and transitions, and then take them back into Premiere Pro."

Also new as part of the mobile launch are Creative Cloud Libraries, keyed to a user's Creative Cloud profile, which can include color palettes, text styles, brushes, images and graphics and are available cross-platform for use with Adobe's desktop and mobile applications. Creative Cloud Extract is a new workflow for web designers and web developers that makes it easier to extract assets from a web-design comp in Photoshop for use in a Dreamweaver site design. Adobe's portfolio service Behance now includes a Talent Search feature designed to make it easier for employers to search for and hire creatives based on the work they share using the service.

Adobe officials will expand on the announcements during its Adobe MAX event, which began Saturday in Los Angeles, with today's keynote beginning at 12:30 p.m. The company said more announcements will be made during that presentation, which should be available for viewing live at www.adobe.com/go/maxkeynote.

Previously announced enhancements to the core Creative Cloud applications are also going live today, including an improved 3D pipeline in After Effects and the new Search Bins feature in Premiere Pro. In addition, Adobe said Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Illustrator are all getting touchscreen support for their CC versions, including an interface revamp to enlarge selection icons and general support for such touch gestures as pinch, zoom, pan and rotate as well as stylus-based control.

Premiere Clip's iPad interface. Click image to load a high-resolution version.

In brief demos given to members of the press last week, the new mobile apps looked impressive, especially for first-generation software. Premiere Clip allows you to import clips into a project and rearrange them into the order you prefer for a rough assembly. You can start trimming the clips, add music (some soundtrack options are included with the app), and make some simple audio-mixing choices, including fading audio in and out, adjusting the soundtrack volume, and employing an Auto Mix feature that reduces the volume of the music when the clip that's playing has audible sound. Projects are continuously synced with Creative Cloud, so you can grab your iPad when the iPhone's canvas gets too small and continue working away from your workstation.

When you're done, you can either share the video directly from Clip using a special viewing URL, or you can import the project into Premiere Pro for detail work and finishing. 

Based on the glimpses that were provided last week, the killer mobile app for creative types may be Shape. You can actually acquire an image by taking a snapshot with your device, then use a few simple controls to turn the picture — say, a hand-drawn logo or some other kind of high-contrast shape — into a fully editable vector graphic that's ready for importing and working with in Illustrator. (It also opens up some efficient new opportunities for copyright infringement, so users will presumably have to be careful about how much "inspiration" they take from the work of others.)

All of this is only available, for now, on iOS. When quizzed about Android and/or Windows Phone support, Morris said, "Not in October." He did suggest that Android capabilities would go into "private beta" soon.

Adobe: www.adobe.com