Premiere Pro 2017 April Update (11.1.0)

PPLOGO2017

A new version of Premiere Pro was available when I got into the office this morning. It's a fairly large update, a pleasant surprise. I'm going to go over the new features that interesting or are important to me.

  • New audio effects & improved integration with Adobe Audition - Send audio effects and keyframes used in Premiere Pro to Audition without any rendering. 
  • Ambisonic audio output for VR-enabled platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. 
  • Support for Apple MacBook Pro Touch bar and Microsoft Surface Dial.
  • Support for new formats.
  • Enhanced support for Team Projects Dynamic Link.
  • Motion graphics Enhanced 4K 60p performance.
  • Improved support for Apple Metal.
  • Video preview of Stock footage within the Libraries panel

The Essential Graphics Panel

This is going to an amazing feature. You can easily create graphic objects and titles on your video and create Shape Layers using the new Rectangle, Oval and free-form drawing tools, and use Text Layers. Which is cool in its own right but I think the true power of this panel is going to be the link to After Effects. You get your graphics guy to design you some amazing lower thirds or title sequence even before you have the names or colours picked out and he/she can choose which feature of the graphic you can edit. That is incredibly powerful. But even without a graphics guy it is much easier to use that trying to make graphics in Premiere before.

Title Tool

Okay so let's talk about the new title tool. It's a little weird at first, but ultimately I think it is going to be better than the old one as it's much easier to do things in the timeline itself. I also really like the ability to create title templates. The first thing I did was make a template for the slate format I use, and it's going to save me so much time in the long run. Don't worry about your old projects though as the old title tool is still part of Premiere. The only thing I don't like about the new title tool, at least as a first impression, is that it doesn't make a new title in your project to have. Final Cut Pro 7 never did this either, so it might not be as important as my knee-jerk reaction is. I cannot deny that it is a lot easier to use and is much faster, though.

Essential Sound Panel

Now I am by no means an audio guy at all! There is a reason it's called an editors mix. I look forward to playing with this tool in a project I'm currently working on that sadly won't get a true audio mix. Seems like it will be perfect for those coreprute videos that never get the budget for proper audio anyway.

New Codec support

I couldn't, not talk about codecs. If you read my blog, you probably know that already. Sadly there isn't too much to report for this update but the updates are welcome none the less. Support for more XAVC formats including Rec 2020 and HGL

In conclusion

This is a great update; setting a high bar for version 12 perhaps later this year or early next year. I didn't even talk about the significant updates to After Effect, Audition, or team projects.

Kody with a K