Editor Kirk Baxter Is Cutting Fincher's Gone Girl Exclusively on Adobe's NLE

Adobe has announced the next slate of feature upgrades for its Creative Cloud video applications, including a new workflow allowing text in After Effects compositions to be edited from Premiere Pro, new effects to help users pull better keys in After Effects, and Typekit integration with Premiere Pro and After Effects. Adobe Anywhere will also get some updates, including the new Hot Backup feature for backing up projects in real-time without stopping the workflow, rough-cut support in Prelude, and After Effects media processing.

Notably, Adobe also revealed that director David Fincher's new film, Gone Girl [pictured, top], is being cut by Kirk Baxter, A.C.E., exclusively with Premiere Pro CC — a major milestone on the long road toward proving Premiere Pro's usability in a feature-film production environment. If you'll recall, it was 2003 when Walter Murch finished editing Cold Mountain using Final Cut Pro 3, then considered a radical workflow choice for a major studio picture. Adobe is no doubt hoping to give Premiere a taste of that same kind of success. Adobe has lined up more testimonials, too, from staffers impressed with Premiere's performance in production for sketches on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Adobe gave members of the press an advance look at some of the new Creative Cloud features, which were demo'd in beta versions. The most potentially life-changing addition for editors is probably the ability to use Adobe's new Live Text Templates to access text elements in After Effects CC compositions without leaving Premiere Pro. That means you can fix pesky typos in elaborate type treatments without roundtripping out of Premiere to make the changes to your AE composition.

The new masking-and-tracking feature, powered by technology from After Effects, will be a boon to anyone who has to fuzz faces or logos out of a shot. Masks can now automatically following subjects as they move through a scene once the initial blur or mosaic has been created. And Premiere Pro shares a nifty new Master Clip effect with SpeedGrade that recognizes effects you apply to a clip and applies your adjustments to every instance of the clip that appears on your timeline, saving you the time it takes to copy and paste the settings yourself.

Premiere Pro Product Manager Al Mooney promised that support for new camera formats in Premiere Pro will remain an area of primary focus. "We are pioneering some really interesting new stuff with Red, whereby we are able to use a supported GPU to debayer the R3D format" without the need for a Red Rocket card, he said. "On a desktop workstation with a powerful GPU, you can play back, pixel-for-pixel, Red media with effects and without dropping frames." He also said Adobe is adding support for the ARRI Amira, Sony SStP, and compressed lossless Cinema DNG from the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. He also noted that Premiere will have presets for GoPro cameras to remove their characteristic fish-eye lens distortion.

After Effects is receiving some new Key Clean effects aimed at allowing users to get a cleaner key from compressed footage, and both AE and Premiere Pro are getting Typekit integration, allowing users to tap more than 700 fonts in Adobe's font library and use those typefaces in their desktop video applications. AE is also getting HTML5 partner panel integration, allowing the same kind of third-party software integration that is available in Premiere. Masks and effects can be added without bringing in additional adjustment or track-matte layers. Masks can also be imported from Premiere Pro (using Dynamic Link) for further refinements.

SpeedGrade is also getting Master Clip support for effects, and the direct-link roundtrip workflow between SpeedGrade and Premiere Pro has been improved. Broadcast scopes have been improved, as has the look manager. Keyboard transport controls have been tweaked to more closely resemble the controls found in Premiere Pro. Adobe Media Encoder will be updated with support for AS-11 MXF files as well as fully compliant 24fcp DCPs.

Adobe said the new updates will be available to Creative Cloud subscribers "in the next couple of months." Adobe has posted a PDF with details on the changes in each of the pro video applications.

Adobe Creative Cloud: www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html