Adobe Inc. today debuted new artificial intelligence features for Premiere Pro, its widely used video editing application. 

The features are powered by Firefly, a series of generative AI models that the company debuted last month. Adobe has also announced plans to integrate the technology into Photoshop and its other creative tools. 

Premiere Pro, the application for which the company debuted new AI features today, is used by film studios, broadcasters and advertising firms to turn raw footage into distribution-ready videos. The software enables artists to combine footage from different cameras into a single clip. Premiere Pro is also used to add special effects and perform related tasks.

Before a scene is shot for a film, artists prepare what’s known as a storyboard. A storyboard is a collection of drawings that provides a preview of how the scene will unfold. The director reviews the drawings to find potential areas for improvement.

According to Adobe, Premiere Pro is receiving an AI feature that can automatically create storyboards from a script provided by the user. Moreover, the feature is capable of generating previsualizations. A previsualization is a 3D animation that, similarly to a storyboard, provides a preview of how a scene will unfold.

Studios don’t use all the footage that is recorded during film production. Rather, they identify the clips that are most aligned with project requirements and discard the rest. Adobe says the AI enhancements rolling out to Premiere Pro will speed up the task of sifting through footage for usable clips.

As part of the update, the company is rolling out a search feature called Text-based Editing. It provides the ability to search large amounts of raw footage for specific clips and assemble those clips into the final video. Artists can interact with Text-based Editing using natural language queries. 

After raw footage is turned into a usable video, it goes through the post-production stage. That’s the part of the film production process where visual effects and quality optimizations are added. Adobe’s new AI features promise to streamline that workflow as well.

Premiere Pro will receive a tool that allows users to change a clip’s color and contrast settings using natural language commands. A user can, for example, instruct the application to make a video appear as if it were captured at a different time of day. Adobe says the feature will reduce the amount of manual work involved in film post-production. 

“With Firefly as a creative co-pilot, you can supercharge your discovery and ideation processes and cut post-production time from days to minutes,” Ashley Still, senior vice president of Adobe’s creative cloud and document cloud divisions, wrote in a blog post. “Imagine the power to instantly change the time of day of a video, automatically annotate and find relevant b-roll, or create limitless variations of clips.”

The company is also adding other time-saving features. Premiere Pro users will gain the ability to generate royalty-free sounds and music automatically, directly in the application’s interface. The built-in AI features can similarly generate subtitles and logos.

Adobe plans to integrate generative AI into not only Premier Pro but also other parts of its product portfolio. Last month, the company debuted new machine learning features for Photoshop that promise to speed up repetitive design tasks. Additionally, it has indicated that generative AI technology will also be incorporated into its Document Cloud suite of document management tools.

Image: Adobe