The update is a window into the future of immersive content creation.
Adobe unveiled a slew of new features in its Creative Cloud update released today, including an immersive 360-degree environment for its widely used video software Premiere Pro and animation suite After Effects.
Now you can twist and turn as you wear a headset to view 360-degree content while editing, a feature that takes us closer to a seamless workflow and melds VR and the video creation process in a real-time setting.
Victoria Nece, Adobe’s product manager for motion graphics and visual effects, told VRScout that the Creative Cloud update will improve the day-to-day production of 360-degree content.
“The focus for this release has been on tools for people who are in the trenches creating this kind of content, and experimenting with where these tools can go,” Nece said.
The updated editor uses Windows 10’s new Mixed Reality Portal and also works on Mac, allowing you to simultaneously preview 360-degree video inside a headset and on a computer screen. As you look around, you can make real-time edits with VR controllers.
“You can now work with someone looking over your shoulder and they can see what’s going on behind the headset,” Nece said. “Before, you would have to spin around in a chair.”
The update lets you make changes to the Premiere Pro timeline from within VR but doesn’t offer the same in-VR editing ability for After Effects, although you can still preview your animations in 360-degrees. But you don’t have the full editorial control the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline offers in the desktop version while in VR, meaning you’ll have to switch out for more detailed edits.
Adobe also improved the plane to sphere tool in After Effects and Premiere Pro, which takes flat content such as text and graphics and makes it circular for VR experiences. David Simonton, a quality engineer at Adobe, told VRScout that users had complained about the quality of 3D images after they were made spherical.
“We found there were some foundational errors in the code that necessitated a rewrite,” Simonton said.
Nece said plane to sphere is now GPU accelerated and faster, resulting in smoother edges without changing the resolution.
“Since it’s the core of so much of the VR pipeline, it should make everything across the board higher quality whenever you are converting anything from flat to spherical,” she said. “So that’s a big, big change.”
Augmented reality was one technology missing from the Creative Cloud update. Adobe executive Mark Asher told VRScout in a previous interview they were working to bring AR features to the market “as fast as we can.”
Nece wouldn’t provide any more details about Adobe’s AR plans — but she didn’t deny something was in the works.
“I think AR has a lot of compelling future uses, right now the tools we’re focusing on for this release are about VR and MR and on video,” Nece said. “And everything else is future based and things I can’t yet talk about.”
Image Credit: Adobe
