Adobe Productions Arrives Just In Time For Premiere Pro Remote Teams
Adobe has launched a new tool for Premiere Pro, with Productions aiming to make organizing a project easier – either on your own or across a team. The new framework arrives as many creatives find themselves working remotely from their usual collaborators, with the coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders putting a temporary end to offices.
That said, this is no hurried app from Adobe, pushed out just to capitalize on remote workers. The company says it has been testing it since recent movies like "Terminator: Dark Fate" and "Dolemite is My Name," in fact.
What's key is that, while Productions is all about dividing projects into smaller chunks, it does so based on the existing Premiere Pro project format. Rather than creating a whole new framework, it connects individual projects and makes them parts of a larger workflow. That could mean grouping by reels or scenes, by season if you're working on an episodic show, or by client for creatives with multiple projects ongoing.
It also aims to be smarter with how re-used content is managed. If you regularly need the same intro sequence, for example, or other assets, they can be referenced from a single file in multiple projects rather than creating duplicates.
A new Production panel is being added in Premiere Pro, which is where all the new tools and controls are being collected. Any projects added to the Productions folder are automatically added to that production. It also automatically synchronizes any changes made on disk with Premiere Pro, and vice-versa.
With shared storage, meanwhile, multiple editors will be able to access the same projects in a production. Adobe is using Project Locking to avoid overwrites: that means, while other people will be able to access a project you're currently working on, and copy content from it, they won't be able to actually make changes to it until you're done. A view of who is working on what at any one time is available through the Production panel.
Cleverly, all projects also share the same settings and even the same scratch disks, so that preview files rendered by one editor can be viewed by everyone else. However projects and assets can be stored solely on local storage if you prefer, for completely offline use.
It's worth noting that Adobe already has a collaboration product, Teams Projects, which works with Premiere Pro. While Productions will be part of Premiere Pro and Adobe will include it with all licenses, Team Projects is only bundled into the Team and Enterprise licenses of Premiere Pro and After Affects. Right now, the company says, "the two toolsets are distinct and currently cannot be combined."
You can find Productions in the latest release of Premiere Pro, which is being pushed out today.