Adobe’s new AI-powered Premiere Pro features eradicate boring audio editing tasks

Adobe is introducing new AI-powered audio editing features to Premiere Pro that aim to remove some of the tedious legwork required to complete editing tasks — such as manually locating specific tools, or cleaning up poor-quality dialogue. New workflows will be available in the Premiere Pro public beta starting today, including interactive fade handles that enable users to quickly create custom audio transitions by dragging them directly across their main editing timeline. The Enhanced Speech beta feature will also become generally available to all Premiere Pro users in the coming weeks.

Other updates to the Premiere Pro beta include AI-powered audio category tagging that automatically identifies and labels clips as dialogue, music, sound effects, or ambient noise, which will now also feature an interactive badge that’s designed to reduce the “mouse mileage” needed to find specific editing tools. Clicking the assigned category badge will open the Essential Sound panel, which provides easy one-click access to the most common tools used to edit that particular type of audio clip. Clip badges have also been redesigned to make audio effects quicker to apply, and make clips with effects already applied easier to identify from the timeline.

Additional quality-of-life improvements being added to the Premiere Pro beta include having waveforms (the graphical representation of sound patterns) automatically resize when track height is adjusted in the editing timeline, and updated colors for clips that make them easier to see. These should grant editors more control over how their timeline can be visually customized to achieve a layout that best complements their personal workflow.

The Premiere Pro beta is a standalone application that’s available to anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription for the main Premiere Pro app. Users can install it from the Beta apps tab of the Creative Cloud desktop launcher, and both versions can co-exist on the same system, allowing creatives to tinker with experimental features before they’re available in the main Premiere Pro app.

For example, Enhanced Speech — a feature that automatically cleans up badly recorded dialogue by removing unwanted background noise and improving overall clarity — will soon be generally available for all Premiere Pro users sometime in February, though Adobe hasn’t specified an exact date. The feature was first introduced to the Premiere Pro beta in September 2023, where it’s still available to try out ahead of its incoming full release.

These updates aren’t intended to automate audio editing entirely, but to optimize the existing process so that editors have more time to work on other projects. “As Premiere Pro becomes the first choice for more and more professional editors, we’re seeing editors being asked to do a lot more than just cut picture. At some level, most editors have to do some amount of color work, of audio work, even titling and basic effects,” said Paul Saccone, senior director for Adobe Pro Video, to The Verge. 

“Sure, there are still specialists you can hand off to depending on the project size, but the more we can enable customers to make this sort of work easier and more intuitive inside Premiere Pro, the more successful they’re going to be in their other creative endeavors.”