Adobe CC 2018 and Premiere Pro & After Effects Improvements

Adobe just unveiled the next generation of Creative Cloud, including four brand new applications, Adobe XD CC for experience design, Adobe Dimension CC for 2D to 3D compositing, Character Animator CC for 2D animation, and an all-new cloud-based photography service, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. In addition, Adobe announced feature updates to its flagship applications including Photoshop CC, and Premiere Pro CC, and ongoing expansion of its Adobe Stock service. Adobe say they built the next generation of Creative Cloud apps in collaboration with the creative community. They mainly focused in three areas:

• Creating next-generation experiences – those that embrace a truly modern approach, so you can work anywhere and any way you want.
• Increasing accessibility to creativity by investing in assets, education and support to make it easier for you to be successful using any platform.
• Accelerating creativity with Adobe Sensei by embedding artificial intelligence capabilities into their products, which make great design more accessible for everyone.

“Adobe continues to lead the creative revolution, driving modernization and innovation that will accelerate the creative process across all platforms and devices,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Today, we unveiled a new generation of Creative Cloud, with a wide spectrum of capabilities—from new experience design, 2D animation and 3D rendering apps to an all-new, cloud-based photography service. These tools enable creative professionals and enthusiasts to express themselves and reach their full creative potential anytime, anywhere, on any device.”

Great news for app designers out there as one of the main focuses of the new updates in CC 2018 is Adobe XD CC – a new designed app developed in open partnership with the design community through a public beta version. Adobe XD is the all-in-one cross-platform solution for designing and prototyping mobile apps and websites. Created by designers for designers, Adobe XD delivers the necessary speed, precision and quality to go from static comps or wireframes to fully interactive prototypes in minutes.

You can get XD for only US $9.99/month or as part of the Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which of course includes the rest such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro and AE.

As part of their efforts to keep photographers happy, Adobe have built the all new Lightroom CC, a cloud-centric photo service for editing, organizing, storing, and sharing photos – from anywhere. For photographers who prefer a more traditional desktop-first workflow, Adobe squeezed in some performance and editing improvements to Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC, previously known as Photoshop Lightroom CC.

The differences between the two versions are laid out in the video below:

So, what about Premiere Pro CC you say? Well, not huge updates, but important to some. Adobe has really focused on deeper collaboration features in Premiere Pro, fancy 360/VR workflow and improved Essential Graphics panel with what they call Responsive Motion Graphics Controls.

Launched in the Spring of 2017, Premiere Pro’s Essential Graphics panel enables you to create titles and motion graphics with the Essential Graphics panel and Motion Graphics templates.

With Responsive Design, your graphics respond intelligently to changes in duration, aspect ratio, and frame size. For example, Responsive Design time-based controls have the ability to preserve the integrity of keyframes (for example n intro and outro) so they are not affected by changes made to the overall clip duration. Responsive Design position-based controls preserve the spatial relationship between layers and video frames when adding animation, changing the character count in a tile, or moving between different frame sizes or aspect ratios.

In the latest release After Effects CC 2018 improves the efficiency of motion graphics creation by streamlining users’ ability to create data-driven graphics and deliver high-quality VR and 3D results. And it does it all faster with GPU performance enhancements.

A new VR Comp Editor in After Effects transforms 360 footage into familiar, flat rectilinear images. A new Extract Cubemap in After Effects simplifies motion tracking and object removal in 360 video while the new VR Converter lets you switch on-the-fly between different immersive formats so you can ensure your final content will play well on any platform.

Design immersive motion graphics experiences using the new Create VR Environment feature, including camera positions — with or without live-action footage.

New effects include:

• VR Blur
• VR Glow
• VR Sharpen
• VR De-noise
• VR Chromatic Aberration
• VR Color Gradients
• VR Digital Glitch
• VR Fractal Noise.

Using these features allows you to add artistry and refinement to immersive footage. Designed to work with spherical 360 imagery, the new effects deliver clean results across stitched content, including stereoscopic media, without artifacts or seamlines.

All this need goodness however, comes with a slight price increase for North America for now at least, but I am sure this will spill over to the UK/EU and other markets.

More info on the price increase below:

• Current STE Student/Education, Creative Cloud Photography and XD plans – no price increase.
• Creative Cloud for Individuals All and Single App plans will increase by 6%.
  • For example, the new price for Creative Cloud All Apps annual plan will be $52.99 per month from $49.99.
• Creative Cloud for Teams plans will increase by 14%.
  • For example, the new price for Creative Cloud for Teams All Apps annual plan will be $79.99 per month from $69.99.

Excited about Adobe CC 2018? Or thinking of trying FCP X or Avid? Do let me know in the comments below. To learn more about Adobe CC 2018 and all the rest of the updates head over to Adobe.

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