How Beta is Helping Us Build Better Products

Delivering ongoing improvements for the Adobe Creative Cloud video & audio applications.

Scene Edit Detection, a new feature in development, is available in Premiere Pro Beta.

Public Beta is transforming the way we build and release software. Today’s release includes nearly 200 bug fixes and performance improvements across Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator, each of which has been through the public Beta program.

Validating faster with public Beta

Whenever our engineers or users identify an issue with one of our applications, it is filed as a bug report. Our first task is to replicate the issue: once we are able to do that, we know what we need to do to fix it. In this release, for example, that included an issue using Dynamic Link with After Effects compositions with some third-party plug-ins. We also addressed an issue in Premiere Pro when switching between editing workspaces. You can find these, along with others on the Fixed Issues pages for Premiere Pro and After Effects.

When we create a fix for an issue, we run it through internal tests for initial validation. After it passes our tests, we introduce it into our Beta builds. While we monitor reports from the Beta builds, we continue our own testing. This allows us to validate fixes faster with a greater level of certainty than before: Beta builds are being tested on a wider variety of system configurations with the added benefit of daily user feedback.

Not all users need to participate in public Beta, but all users benefit from the program. Check out Jason Levine’s interview with David Simons, who is leading our public Beta initiative.

Performance improvements in this release

Today’s new release includes performance improvements, such as faster launch times for Premiere Pro (14.3). By optimizing how Premiere Pro reads the plug-ins registry, initial launches on macOS are up to 6x faster.

This graph shows faster launch times in the latest release of Premiere Pro.

This release offers workflow improvements, like better re-linking for offline media in Audition (13.0.7). Missing media is now displayed in the Files panel where user can do all of their relinking. If you have a lot of files in a project, this is faster than right-clicking individual clips in the timeline.

Relink offline media directly from the Files panel in Audition.

Adding Apple Afterburner support

Supporting new technologies and optimizing our applications for them helps us guide our development and ensure future performance. We’re pleased to now offer support for Apple Afterburner, which provides hardware decoding/playback for Apple ProRes 422 and ProRes 4444 media. Using dedicated hardware for playback frees up CPU cycles for other tasks and allows Premiere Pro to work more efficiently.

Apple Afterburner support reduces the load on the CPU for better overall performance.

Download the new releases

The new release of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator are available for download today from the Creative Cloud desktop application. Learn more about the latest features, including Adobe Stock Audio integration in Premiere Pro.

Interested in testing new builds and features? It’s easy to participate in public Beta. Beta builds of the Adobe video tools are available directly from the Creative Cloud desktop application.

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