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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1451520
Some Holiday Surprises from Adobe By Ric Getter With timing unusual for Adobe, late December brought some significant announcements during what is usually a period of quiescence for the company. Some of these were new beta features that made their way into production software sooner than expected, but in one instance, highlights a significantly refreshed, if not entirely new, initiative. I’m Your Puppet For a long time, users have been hoping that Adobe fleshes out Character Animator with expanded tracking. In December, their most wanted feature came to life in the production version with full-body tracking. Full-body tracking, just as it sounds, can track all your limbs using the camera, not just your face and head. The Puppet Maker starts you out at a point somewhere between using a pre-built character or your own artwork and gives you a wide assortment of options to customize it. Even with all the options, the creation process is remarkably easy, with no worries about rigging your own image as a character. The ability for a shop to create their own templates still isn’t ready for prime time, but Adobe says that they’re working on it. You may have noticed that Adobe made some significant inroads in speech-to-text with Premiere thanks to some new Sensei AI smarts. The December release of Character Animator lets you add a transcript of an audio track to improve lip sync, creating more accurate visemes, the animated lip movements. Premiere Pro’s graphic and title capabilities got a significant boost with this release. Having had to create lower-thirds near the end of a twelve-hour edit session, we give a particularly warm welcome to Premiere Pro’s new Spell Check function that will searchout spelling anomalies throughout an entire sequence. There is also a Global Search and Replace feature that will scan all the text in a sequence. Apple’s M1 Pro and M1 Max Macs can expect 5x faster acceleration. Exporting HEVC high-res for all M1 Macs is considerably faster with Premiere Pro’s new hardware decoding abilities.