Adobe Creative Cloud video applications see their April 2021 updates today

These latest updates give us further insight into Adobe’s roadmap for the immediate to possibly mid term future.

The release of updates to Premiere Rush and Premiere Pro is accompanied by a document reiterating Adobe’s pivot to more frequent and smaller updates combined with a robust public beta program where those features real-world tested by users find their way into applications. Clearly Adobe’s plan is to listen to its users not just in terms of bugs found in beta but more significantly in terms of overall development processes.

This month sees updates to Premiere Rush and Premiere Pro

Premiere Rush

Apple’s new M1 computers are seeing native software versions across all manufacturer lines and here Adobe’s popular mobile creation platform goes native. Premiere Rush can now take advantage of performance enhancements brought by M1 with improved playback and editing plus faster exports. The update is seemeless in that M1users won’t see any differences other than speed.

There are some changes in the iOS versions of Rush. Tapping on a video clip in the timeline brings up a context menu with options to split, duplicate or delete a clip as well as to separate audio from video.

Rush will now also be available for Samsung Note 20/20+ Android devices.

Premiere Pro 

It gets a dot-update to 15.1 and brings optimized hardware-accelerated H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) encoding on Intel Machines. Adobe claims it is 1.8x faster.

On both Windows and Mac OS Lumetri presets gain dynamic previews. So applying a Lumetri effect displays a frame from the current sequence with previews displayed from the actual clip.

Lumetri presets in Adobe's Premiere Pro April 2021 update.

Notable is the absence of a release version of Adobe speech to text which Adobe has been touting the last number of months. And here is where much of the strategy is apparent.

Speech-to-text with transcription and captioning has been in public beta for a number of months on an application basis. Those who applied to Adobe and were accepted (and I do not know the percentage of acceptances or the criteria which Adobe utilized) were not only granted access to a special beta version of Premiere Pro but also that beta feature was locked to the user’s Adobe ID. Thus Adobe’s last incremental release actually included the speech to text beta panel, something not found in the release version for non-beta participants. It actually inspires confidence that when speech to text is finally released officially, it will have gone through actual user workflows and feedback to Adobe.

Adobe updates appear in the Creative Cloud app which can be configured either to prompt for updates or just install them automatically as Adobe releases.