Adobe Premiere Pro v25.5 adds new motion capabilities, updates for audio editing and timeline playback, and a whole host of additional improvements that the company says are aimed at making life better for editors.
There is a lot to unpack with Premiere Pro 25.5, so let's not hang about.
Thanks to Adobe's recent acquisition of Film Impact, there is a huge slate of customizable transitions, cinematic effects, and text and graphic animations designed for pro editors being added to the software. They’re all GPU-accelerated too, meaning that they should playback in real time as soon as you drag and drop.
Adobe says there are 'dozens' of new dissolves, blurs, and wipes now included, as well as everything from earthquake to glitch, distortion, VHS damage, and chaos transitions.
A new library of effects in Premiere Pro adds glows, blurs, and echoes to help you add photorealistic bokeh, volumetric rays, glowing halation, glints and more. There's a lot here, from vignettes that warp to any shape you desire to the ability to independently shift red, green, and blue channels to color correct for fluorescent lighting. "We’ve got curve editors, color pickers, chromatic aberration, custom blend modes, and so much more – everything you need to drag, drop, and animate," says the company's Jason Druss. "Even add a camera shake effect so realistic you’ll swear your tripod shots were captured on someone’s shoulder."
One of the interesting things about all this is that the work of animating text, video, and graphics is now as easy as dragging and dropping a transition. Theoretically that means you can save hours of round-tripping to After Effects by keeping your motion work inside of Premiere Pro.
There's even a new “Surprise Me” button. With just one click, you can preview endless variations of your effect or transition for ideating outside of the box and stretching your imagination.
All 90+ transitions, effects, and animations can be accessed from the Effects panel, or by navigating to the Window menu and select “Film Impact Dashboard” in the Extensions menu for an interactive panel with live previews of every tool.
The timeline has been overhauled under the hood to improve interactivity, visibility, and speed.
"Since the launch of Premiere Pro, dragging a clip on the timeline meant moving around an empty rectangle," explains Druss. "If you wanted to see how an edit would impact the audio, you’d have to eyeball it and guess until you got the result you wanted. We know all that extra clicking really adds up, so we’ve revamped the sequence: Now audio waveforms remain visible when dragging a clip or performing common edit tasks, like ripple/roll edits or rate stretch."
Alongside this, keyframes and markers are displayed alongside the waveform while dragging a clip too, helping you maintain sync with key audio or visual elements.
As well as last year's visual fade handles, you can now add or adjust multiple fades at the same time. Just select all the clips at once.
There's a goal in mind too when it comes to playback. In the last few releases, scrolling, skimming, and UI refresh rate have all been improved, but the moonshot is to make it less than a tenth of a second to start playback for every Premiere Pro user.
"We’ve already made a ton of progress here, and you can expect to see even more work on playback speed soon," says Druss. For 25.5 that means:
After Effects gets some update love too. Quick Offset is a nifty tool that allows you to highlight and shift the positions of multiple keyframes or layers with one simple click-and-drag. No matter how simple or complex your comp is, you can adjust the temporal relationships between layers or keyframes faster than ever before.
Adobe also promises significantly smoother zooming and navigation inside the comp viewer, as well as caching improvements for even faster preview and playback.