New Versions Support 6K Red Dragon Footage, Improve SpeedGrade Roundtrips, Add After Effects Mask Tracker

Adobe updated its Creative Cloud video products again last week, adding new features that were previewed at IBC in September. The DirectLink pipeline between Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade has been improved, allowing multi-track timelines to be shared between the programs, making Premiere Pro sequences openable in SpeedGrade, and showing looks applied in SpeedGrade as effects in Premiere Pro, managed by Adobe's Lumetri color engine. SpeedGrade also includes camera patches that make it easier to match color across different camera formats and support for multiple masks.

Also in Premiere, metadata capabilities have been expanded and multicamera support has been improved and simplified. And native support has been added for new camera formats — notably including 6K Red Dragon footage. The Link and Locate workflow has been further improved, and image processing options have been added to Media Encoder.

A new mask tracker in After Effects automatically tracks masks throughout a composition, potentially eliminating the need to roto them on a frame-by-frame basis. After Effects has also gotten a new media browser.

Adobe's collaborative Adobe Anywhere system has been expanded with support for After Effects and a new iPad app for remote playback.

The ability to add major new features over time is a major selling point of the Creative Cloud subscription service, which Adobe has said will allow it to abandon its traditional product cycle, which previously offered big annual upgrades but only minor incremental bug fixes and updates during the rest of the year. The feature updates are free to current Creative Cloud subscribers.