NAB is only three short days away and Adobe has promised to unveil all the new features they're including in Creative Cloud 2016 at the event. Until then, they've provided a sneak peek at some exciting updates coming to After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Now, before you get too excited, let's be clear. This "sneak peek" is just that — a sneak peek, and is centered only on performance upgrades for After Effects, as well as a few small, but still exciting updates to Premiere Pro. Again, Adobe is waiting until NAB to make a full official announcement of all of the new features they'll be adding to Creative Cloud.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get to it.

After Effects

"Under the Hood" Improvements

According to their blog post, Adobe will be improving performance and quality, as well as enhancing video and audio playback, including a new preview architecture that "delivers real-time playback of cached frames with synced audio." Also, After Effects is about to get a whole lot faster. From Adobe:

The next version of After Effects CC is faster and more reliable from file import and project load through to final render. Scrubbing the timeline, working with complex masks, and editing large numbers of keyframes is now more fluid, thanks to accelerated interface interactions.

This video gives you a quick overview of these upgrades:

Faster 3D Workflows

The effects in After Effects are about to get a whole lot faster, too. Lumetri Color and Gaussian Blur (to name a couple) are getting GPU-acceleration so you can use effects, make changes, and see instant results. According to Adobe, testers have seen speeds increase up to 5x. The color grading workflow for Lumetri Color has also been updated with HSL Secondaries and new Looks presets.

Furthermore, Adobe is providing better integration with MAXON Cinema 4D for those interested in doing 3D modeling right in After Effects:

Improved MAXON Cinema 4D exporter: Export animated 3D text and shape layers to Cinema 4D for a roundtrip Live 3D motion graphics workflow. Customize your exported elements in Cinema 4D (Cinema 4D Lite is included with After Effects), save your changes, and see them update live in After Effects via CINEWARE.

Adobe's also improving After Effects with faster image sequence importing (10x faster), improvements to Adobe Stock, Creative Cloud libraries, and Adobe Character Animator. To learn more about these upgrades, head on over to Adobe.

Premiere Pro

New Media Management

Managing your data in Premiere Pro will be better than ever. According to Adobe, these upgrades give you more control over "the handling of your files during the ingest process, and allow for more flexibility when working with very large media."

Support for More Native Formats and Auto Proxy Generation

Not only will Premiere Pro support 6K and 8K files from RED Weapon, you'll be able to automatically generate proxies on ingest, and still work on the original files while you wait for transcoding to finish.

More Lumetri Color Upgrades

As we've already mentioned, Lumetri Color is getting a speed boost, but it's also getting a few great features, like new SpeedLooks linear looks, enhanced scopes, and new HSL Secondaries, which allow for "quick, intuitive selection of color ranges within a shot."

Support for VR Workflows

Everybody and their mom is talking about virtual reality, and part of Adobe's Premiere upgrade includes support for VR workflows.

You can import equi-rectangular stitched video media and – with a click of a button in the monitors – enter VR Video mode, which allows you to use pan and tilt controls to preview the experience inside the sphere. You can even click-drag directly on the video clip and freely pan around so you know what your viewer would be seeing when looking in a given direction. When you’re ready to share, you can easily add a metadata flag to ensure you’ll get the full panoramic experience on supported sites like YouTube and Facebook.

To learn more about the features included in this Premiere sneak peek, head on over to Adobe.

Again, we won't get the full list of upgrades until Adobe announces them at NAB, so stay tuned and look out for our live coverage at this year's NAB Show.