NAB 2024: Adobe Talks Premiere Pro AI-Powered Audio Workflow Updates

Adobe Senior Product Manager Kylee Peña discusses and demos new audio workflow updates in Premiere Pro designed to save time and reduce mouse usage in this interview with Streaming Media's Marc Franklin in the Adobe booth at NAB 2024. These include new visual fade handles, audio category tagging, updated effects badges, and redesigned clip colors. The AI automatically recognizes audio clips as dialogue, music, sound effects, or ambience. The updates also make it easier to access audio tools already in Premiere Pro, such as Enhanced Speech, Auto Ducking, Remix, and loudness matching. The new features are currently in beta but will be released soon.

Marc Franklin: This is Marc Franklin for Streaming Media Producer at the Adobe booth at NAB 2024, and we're going to talk to Senior Product Marketing Manager Kylee Peña about some of the new features in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Kylee Peña: We're really excited to bring some new audio workflow updates in Premiere Pro, and these are really going to save people time and reduce the mouse mileage because. Before you're just dragging the mouse all around and it takes a lot of clicks to find exactly what you need. I got into editing to be a picture editor, not an audio person, so I need a little help in that regard. So this really helps to focus on the tools that are most relevant to your audio sound type.

Something I really love here in the timeline, we have new visual fade handles, so I'll zoom in a little bit so you can even see it a little better. Before you had to right-click or drag a transition on here, now you can drag this little box and just add a visual fade so you can change how long it is and how much it ramps up. Yes. And then also if you go down here, you can cross fade across different clips, so can drag across as well. So now I have all of these indications of the timeline and I can see exactly what's going on and I have an idea of the volume and the nature of the fade and everything like that. So that's super handy.

Marc Franklin: Is that going to replace the icon for the audio transition?

Kylee Peña: Yes it does. Isn't it so much prettier? And it's a lot more useful. The other thing that is fabulous about this release is audio category tagging powered by aAI. So when you add in a clip into the sequence, an audio clip, it'll automatically recognize it as dialogue, music, sound effects or ambiance, and it adds this helpful little icon. So you can visually scan here, I can see this is dialogue, this is sound effects, and so on. But even better is you can click on that and it'll pop open the essential sound panel right here. And it's got the most relevant tools for that audio type. So I can jump right into enhanced speech loudness, repair, everything there. And it's contextual. So when I change over to sound effects, I see things that are most likely to be used for sound effects as well. So it really helps you get to a really good sounding mix faster. With the tools that are right here, you don't have to dig into a bunch of different effects to get to that point.

Marc Franklin: Bringing up an older project from where you have the audio transitions, will it automatically convert to this?

Kylee Peña: Yes. So, we also updated the effects badges. So right here, if I hover over this, I can see which effects are added. I can right-click on it and I can add effects straight from here. It can hit Add Effects and it'll open the Effects window, or I can click on this and it'll open the Effect Controls panel. So now I can come in here, I see this has a pitch shifter, so I can adjust that in here. So I can go into the rich in deep audio mixing tools that are already in Premiere through that much easier. We've also redesigned the clip colors. We've got colors that are easier to read and they're very vibrant. And you'll notice the waveform scale with the track height before when you would collapse the tracks. That kind of turned into a bunch of Tetris blocks, which are cool, but not really useful.

But now the waveform scale as you go up and down, which is really great. So those are all things that are in beta right now and they're going to be coming to Premiere Pro very soon. Also makes it a lot easier to see all the great audio tools that are already in Premiere Pro, like Enhanced Speech, Auto Ducking, remix and loudness matching. So it should help everyone get to their final mix and fewer clicks, reduce mouse mileage, and get a great sounding mix faster. And even if you do go and do a final mix outside of Premiere, this helps your offline edit sound good. So you can sell the edit, get to the point where it can then be finished by someone else. So it sounds really good and it gets people immersed in the story and the craft.

Marc Franklin: So is there anything that you can think of that where people want to go into Audition instead of doing in Premiere?

Kylee Peña: Of course you can jump over into Audition. We still have that and we're trying to bring some of the key tools into Premiere, so you don't have to, but you can go deep with the deeper audio tools there. For example, with Remix, you can go a little deeper there, so some people just want to go in and paint out frequencies and things like that. But for everyone else, you can stick around in Premiere and get quite a bit further now too. This is in beta, but it's going to be shipping in the next version very soon.