Adobe Premiere Pro is about to get better at working on big projects — and letting multiple users collaborate on the same video production.
The vendor is adding a new set of tools called “Productions” to its Premiere Pro video editing software. Those will provide features for managing projects and sharing assets among them, along with specific content-management capabilities designed for multi-user environments. Adobe said Productions will be “coming soon” via an upgrade to Premiere Pro customers.
Adobe is showing off a preview of Premiere Pro’s Productions at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The company said it designed the features with input from filmmakers and Hollywood editorial teams, as Premiere Pro has become more widely adopted in the industry.
According to Adobe, early versions of Productions were beta-tested on recent films “Terminator: Dark Fate” from director Tim Miller and Netflix’s “Dolemite Is My Name,” the Eddie Murphy-starrer directed by Craig Brewer. In addition, special builds of Premiere Pro with Productions are being used on films currently in production including David Fincher’s “Mank” for Netflix.
“We don’t do anything without consulting with our customers,” said Van Bedient, senior business development manager at Adobe. “We don’t say, ‘Here, this is how you’re going to do this now’” with a new feature or product.
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With Productions, Premiere Pro users can divide large projects into smaller pieces. For example, teams working on a film can organize their workflows around reels and scenes. Production teams on episodic TV shows can group projects by season, making it easier to retrieve assets like title sequences or audio elements. Ad agencies, meanwhile, can allocate a Production to each client to be able to quickly reference and retrieve assets from existing projects.
The new Production panel in Premiere Pro provides a “command center” for managing multi-project workflows, providing an overall view into who is working on what, according to Adobe.
Using shared local storage, multiple editors can work on different projects in the same Production. A “project locking” feature ensures that nobody overwrites someone else’s work; teammates can still access your project and copy content from it, but they can’t make changes until you’ve completed your edit. You can also “check out” an asset to work on it offline with Productions.
All projects in a Production share the same settings, including scratch disks. That, according to Adobe, means that preview files rendered by one editor are available for all editors who use that project, speeding up group collaboration. All projects added to the Productions folder become part of the Production. And regardless of whether someone is using macOS or Windows, any changes they make on disk are reflected in Premiere Pro (and, vice versa, changes in Premiere Pro are applied on disk).
Watch a video demo of the Productions features coming to Adobe Premiere Pro: