Team Projects and Character Animator Come Out of Beta in Upcoming Fall 2017 Release
In advance of IBC, Adobe announced new features coming to its Creative Cloud video applications, including the release of Team Projects, new VR support in Premiere Pro and, at last, Character Animator v1.0.
360-degree video creation in Premiere Pro should be easier now that Adobe has introduced a way for users to keep working using keyboard shortcuts while wearing a VR headset to view the environment. A new plane-to-sphere effect makes it easier to project titles into the 360-degree environment, and orientation-aware ambisonics audio export for YouTube and Facebook is now supported.
Originally included in the Creative Cloud suite as a beta application back in 2015, the easy-to-use animation and puppeting software Character Animator has been used for real-time animation on The Simpsons and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The latest update adds pose-to-pose blending, additional controls for character facial features, and more options for using a keyboard or MIDI device to set off animation triggers.
Adobe said its machine-learning framework, called Adobe Sensei, is improving lip-sync by matching mouth shapes to spoken words. Another Sensei perk is showing up in Audition, where the new auto-ducking feature will automatically adjust sound levels by track type, once they are labeled as dialogue, background sound or music.
Also coming out of beta in the next release is Adobe’s new Team Projects feature aimed at collaborative workflow. New managed-access features will allow project-locking over shared storage networks, Adobe said, and version management has been improved with an auto-save history.
And Adobe said it has tweaked Premiere Pro’s Essential Graphics panel to include new responsive design options, and will soon offer access to “hundreds” of new motion graphics templates through Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud libraries.
As usual with these updates, Adobe is not saying exactly when they will show up on your desktop. But they are promised for fall 2017, and they’ll be available for preview from September 15-19 at Adobe’s IBC booth : 7.G27.
