Adobe MAX 2016: Adobe Launches ‘Sensei’, Adds New VR, Social Publishing Features to Premiere Pro

At Adobe MAX 2016 this week, Adobe showcased next-generation Creative Cloud innovation, including the next release of Adobe Premiere Pro CC featuring new virtual-reality and social media publishing features, as well as new developments brewing in the company’s research labs. Adobe also announced Adobe Sensei, a new framework and set of intelligent services spanning the entire Adobe Cloud Platform, aimed at dramatically improving how customers design and deliver digital experiences.

In addition to Creative Cloud announcements, Adobe MAX featured keynotes from creative leaders, including filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, fashion designer Zac Posen and photographer Lynsey Addario.

“Adobe MAX is where the creative community comes together to see the latest in Creative Cloud innovation and be inspired by the world’s best creative minds,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “This year, we’ll be showcasing amazing breakthroughs in experience design, photography, virtual reality, character animation and 3D compositing.”

Adobe Premiere Adds VR, Social Publishing Features
The next release of Adobe Premiere Pro CC includes auto-aware virtual reality (VR) that seamlessly detects and applies the correct setting to stereoscopic and monoscopic media. First introduced at IBC, updates to Premiere Pro, After Effects CC and Prelude CC will also include a Beta of Team Projects that allows teams and enterprise customers to co-edit and collaborate on Creative Cloud projects.

In addition, Adobe announced the public beta of the Social Publishing Panel for Premiere Pro CC, a streamlined social publishing workflow that helps online content creators take advantage of the strengths of several popular social media platforms—without leaving the Creative Cloud workspace. Social Publishing Panel (Beta) in Premiere Pro is powered by Adobe Marketing Cloud technology and enables quick exporting of videos to social channels, as well as data analysis of video content. Features in this new panel include cross-platform social publishing and performance tracking, recommendations for peak performance, keyword presets, and more. More info here.

The Social Publishing Panel joins a lineup of other great features announced at IBC 2016, that are now available on CC video tools, including new virtual reality workflows in Premiere Pro CC and the Team Projects hosted collaboration service.

Adobe is also releasing a new Cinema 4D renderer in After Effects that will speed up efficiency and quality of 3D content generation.

Adobe Sensei Up the Automation Ante
Adobe also announced Adobe Sensei, a new framework and set of intelligent services for dramatically improving the design and delivery of digital experiences. Adobe Sensei’s intelligent services tackle today’s complex experience challenges—including image matching across millions of images, understanding the meaning and sentiment of documents and finely targeting important audience segments—leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning capabilities. Spanning the entire Adobe Cloud Platform, this announcement builds upon the machine learning capabilities unveiled in Adobe Marketing Cloud at Adobe Summit in March.

Adobe Sensei harnesses the company’s massive volume of content and data assets—from high-resolution images to customer clicks—providing an unparalleled ability to design, deliver and manage digital experiences. Adobe Sensei includes a unified AI/machine learning framework and a set of intelligent services that power Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud. Dozens of these intelligent services have been deployed in Adobe products to date. The company is significantly increasing its investment in Adobe Sensei and intends to make it available to its ecosystem of partners, ISVs and developers who will extend Adobe’s industry leading cloud products and build custom solutions on top of them.

Adobe Sensei is built into the company’s cloud offerings, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud, to automate mundane tasks, drive predictive and personalization capabilities, and boost productivity. Examples of Adobe Sensei intelligent services across Adobe’s cloud offerings include: Content Intelligence, Face Aware Editing, Semantic Segmentation, Intelligent Audience Segmentation, Attribution, and Natural Language Processing.

More News From Adobe MAX 2016
A new Mac release of Adobe Experience Design CC (XD), the first all-in-one tool for designing, prototyping and sharing user experiences for website and mobile apps, is now available with two new features – Layers and Symbols support. First made popular in Adobe’s flagship design tools Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC, XD reimagines Layers and Symbols to address the specific needs of user experience (UX) designers. Designers using XD can now easily share prototypes and get feedback in real-time. At MAX, Adobe provided a sneak peek at new capabilities that enable real-time collaboration including co-editing of documents, visual versioning and Creative Cloud Libraries enhancements. This innovation helps individuals and enterprises keep pace with the surging demand for high-quality content.

Project Felix is an industry-first design tool that enables graphic designers to easily create high-quality, photo-realistic images by combining 2D and 3D assets for projects such as product shot comps, scene visualization and abstract design. Users have in-app access to 3D models, materials and lights from Adobe Stock as well as the ability to customize specific properties like materials, perfect lighting and adjust camera angles. Real-time rendering allows users to preview work while editing and before exporting to Photoshop to complete their design.

Adobe Stock is evolving the way people market and sell their work to peers. At MAX, Adobe announced a partnership with Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news provider, to bring Reuters video and photography to Adobe Stock’s new editorial collection. Available through Adobe Creative Cloud, creatives will be able to access Reuters editorial content.

Released as a beta in September 2016, the Adobe Stock Contributor site is now available at MAX and allows users to sell their creative work to the world’s largest creative community from within Creative Cloud. The expanded Adobe Stock service now offers more than 60 million royalty-free, high-quality photos, videos, illustrations, graphics and 3D models, as well as the addition of templates, a new asset type designed to help users kick-start new projects. Adobe Stock also leverages machine learning to dramatically improve search and contributor workflows, including a new auto-keyword feature (Beta), that save time by automatically generating the first five keywords of each image based on keywords from successful similar images.

Adobe is also introducing a new way to find, purchase and manage individual fonts from premier foundries including Frere-Jones Type, Type Network/Font Bureau and Émigré with the new Adobe Typekit marketplace. Complementing the Typekit subscription included in the Creative Cloud membership, Typekit marketplace will integrate across Creative Cloud tools to nearly double the number of individual fonts available for use. Businesses and consumers can use Typekit marketplace to more easily find and purchase fonts for professional or personal design projects, including websites, marketing materials, invitations and more.

Updates to Creative Cloud include new offerings and functionality that enhance collaboration, learning and discoverability to help users deliver their best work faster. Key updates include a modern new interface and fast, flexible coding engine in Dreamweaver CC and a new Photoshop universal search bar that allows users to quickly search tools, panels, menus, Adobe Stock assets, help content and tutorials. Adobe Spark allows anyone to easily create and share stunning content and Creative Cloud paid members now have access to exclusive features in Adobe Spark. Adobe is also bringing its popular mobile applications Photoshop Sketch, Adobe Comp CC and Photoshop Fix to Android with this release.

For a comprehensive view of the latest Creative Cloud innovations, click here.

• For the latest updates to Photoshop CC, Photoshop Sketch, Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix, and an introduction to Project Felix, click here.
• For graphic designers, updates to Illustrator CC and InDesign CC can be found here.
• For web designers, updates to Dreamweaver CC and Animate CC.
• For filmmakers, a comprehensive view of the latest video and audio tools news can be found here. In addition, updates to Character Animator (Beta) and Audition CC.
• For more information on the Adobe Photoshop Sketch update introducing Photoshop brushes from designer Kyle Webster, click here.
• For more information on State of Create: 2016, a global survey from Adobe that found investing in creativity pays off with tangible benefits – from higher income to greater national competitiveness and productivity.

Pricing and Availability
Updates to Creative Cloud desktop software will ship to Creative Cloud members before the end of the year. Membership plans are available for individuals, students, teams, educational institutions, government agencies and enterprises. Adobe’s new and updated mobile apps are available for free download from Apple App Store and Google Play now.