Lighting up Tinseltown

A little over a year ago, we opened our Los Angeles office to provide high-caliber support to the Hollywood filmmaking community. We were already seeing significant adoption of Adobe Premiere Pro CC and other Adobe Creative Cloud tools in film, television, and online productions, and it made sense for us to provide even more focused, hands-on support in the area.

Little did we know that less than a year later, we’d be thanking the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science for its recognition of Adobe After Effects CC and Adobe Photoshop CC with two Scientific and Engineering Awards.

The road leading to this honor has been years in the making, a culmination of our team’s innovation and dedication to developing artistic tools that enable filmmakers to bring their creative visions to screens, big and small. Adobe engages with the filmmaking community to help ensure that each new product release has their needs in mind, resulting in even more robust tools for professional editing and production teams. Because of this, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that many of 2018’s acclaimed films came to be with Premiere Pro.

The road to the Oscars

RBG and Minding the Gap, both edited with Premiere Pro, were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature_._ For RBG directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, it was their first time editing with Adobe. Minding the Gap director Bing Liu, on the other hand, has been experimenting with Premiere Pro since he was a teenager. The film represents his directorial debut.

The Coen brothers’ most recent project, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (streaming now on Netflix), received a nod in the Best Adapted Screenplay category and made extensive use of Shared Projects and After Effects integration, while Capernaum was shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film, and cut on Premiere Pro.

We congratulate the nominees on achieving this career milestone!

Reeling in the accolades

The road to the Academy Awards for RBG and Minding the Gap began at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film Searching, edited with Premiere Pro with all of the screens recreated in Adobe Illustrator and animated in Adobe After Effects, also premiered at Sundance in 2018 before going on to enjoy box office success. The majority of films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival were cut with Premiere Pro CC, including:

• The Infiltrators, which won both the Audience and Innovator Awards in the NEXT category
• Knock Down the House, which took home the Audience Award in the U.S. Documentary category
• Last Black Man in San Francisco, which received the Directing Award and the Special Jury Award for Creative Collaboration in the U.S. Dramatic category
• Always in Season, which was recognized with the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Moral Urgency
• Clemency, which won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category

We’re excited to watch as the success of these films continues to unfold. Other notable, high-profile projects that came to life in 2018 with Premiere Pro are The Old Man and the Gun, featuring Robert Redford, and the Air Jordan documentary Unbanned: the Legend of AJ1.

On the television front, editor Kyle Reiter demonstrated his Premiere Pro prowess on the first two seasons of FX Network’s Atlanta, receiving an American Cinema Editors Eddie Award for his work. The HBO series Two Dope Queens is also cut with Premiere Pro, as is the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, which took home the 2018 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Documentary for Nonfiction Series.

The place where dreams come true

We’re looking forward to another stellar year helping the industry’s creative professionals achieve success. We’re excited to continue hosting training sessions in our fully equipped edit suite, and monthly livestream conversations on entertainment industry topics such as feature film editing, TV streaming, advertising, music videos, and more. You can catch the next one by following our Premiere Pro Facebook page.

Until then, we congratulate all the filmmakers and others who pushed Premiere Pro beyond its limits once again. The industry has taken notice, and we thank you.

Learn more about how Hollywood post-production professionals make the most of their time and effort by taking advantage of Adobe’s essential and cutting-edge features for pro editors and assistant editors here.