Adobe Targeting Hollywood Editors With New Version of Premiere Pro

Software developer Adobe is taking aim at Hollywood with a new version of its Premiere Pro CC editing software.

Premiere Pro has been used on some notable film and TV projects — recent examples include Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner The Square, edited by the film’s writer/director Ruben Ostlund and Jacob Secher Schulsinger, and the upcoming Only the Brave (formerly titled Granite Mountain Hotshots), edited by Billy Fox.

But Hollywood’s editing world is largely dominated by the Avid Media Composer, among the earliest nonlinear editing systems, which is used on most major features. Now, Adobe is hoping to muscle in on these larger projects with some new collaboration and sharing tools for Premiere Pro, including a new bin-locking feature that allows users to lock bins (portions of) a project and give “read-only” access to others.

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“It was a make or break feature for some editors,” admits Bill Roberts, Adobe’s senior director of professional video product management.

Roberts explained that while many editors found a suitable workflow from the current version of Premiere Pro in the Adobe Creative Cloud, larger motion picture projects are more collaborative, involving multiple assistants and sometimes, more than one editor. “For Hollywood [sharing] was a requirement. We felt if we didn’t deliver, we wouldn’t have success [in motion picture editing]. What we were hearing was that [the current version] was increasing the burden of work on the assistants.”

Roberts and the development team are looking forward to introducing the new features next week. Roberts also revealed that Michael Phillips, a co-inventor of the Avid Film Composer, had been consulting on this upgrade.

The new version will debut at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam and is expected to become available during the fall.