Image: Adobe Disclosure: DPReview is attending Adobe Max, with Adobe covering travel and lodging expenses. Adobe has announced new features for its Premiere Pro video editor. The updated tools could make it much easier to achieve effects that previously would've required specialized compositing software.
The first and biggest one is called Object Masks, which lets you select an object, such as a person or product, in the video. Premiere will then use AI to detect the edges and create a mask for it, separating it from the background so you can apply effects or transitions to each part of your video, independently.
The Object Mask feature should make it relatively easy to select and track specific elements of your footage.
Image: Adobe
This may sound familiar to Lightroom users; Adobe's photo-editing apps have had similar masking tools for a while now. It's also essentially an automated version of rotoscoping, which has long been one of the most tedious parts of video editing.
Of course, a mask wouldn't be particularly useful if it's only for a single frame. Adobe has also updated the built-in mask tracking features to make them faster and better at dealing with changes in perspective if the object is moving towards or away from the camera. If you're running tracking on an Object Mask, Premiere will try to adjust the mask's shape to match whatever you're trying to track as it moves.
Image: Adobe
The standard shape masks made using the rectangle, eclipse or pen tools have also been updated with a cleaner UI and support for the updated tracking tools.
The updates are launching in public beta today, and will likely be a welcome addition to editors who use Premiere, especially if Object Masks works as well as they do in Adobe's demos.
Exciting as they are, masks aren't the only thing that have gotten an update in Premiere. There's a new auto-censoring feature that uses the automatic transcription to let you bleep out any specific words you don't want included in the final cut. Premiere will also let you use a custom sound, if you'd prefer something other than the traditional swear beep. The feature is launching as a public beta today.
We'll be on the ground at Adobe Max this year, so stay tuned for demos of some of these new features and previews of what we might see over the next year.
2025-10-29 15:00
