Adobe Premiere Pro now lets you find video clips by describing them

Search in Premiere Pro has been updated with AI-powered visual recognition, allowing users to find videos by describing the contents of the footage. It’s just one of several quality-of-life features Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io that aim to save video editors time on their projects.

Users can enter search terms like “a person skating with a lens flare” to find corresponding clips within their media library. Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize “objects, locations, camera angles, and more,” alongside spoken words — providing there’s a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn’t detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn’t require an internet connection, and Adobe reiterates that users’ video content isn’t used to train any AI models.

This is launching alongside a translation feature for video captions that supports 17 languages. Multiple caption tracks can be opened simultaneously in Premiere Pro to make it easier to view and edit several translations at once. The media intelligence-empowered Search panel and caption translations are available starting today in the beta version of Premiere Pro, which is available to anyone with an active Creative Cloud or Premiere Pro subscription.

After Effects now supports HDR monitoring and has been overhauled with a new caching system that makes it faster to preview or playback large project files. The app is no longer limited to storing all the rendered frames in your system memory — instead, both RAM and the disk cache of your computer storage are used to improve performance. Adobe says this will allow older desktops and laptops to play back entire compositions “without having to pause for caching or rendering.” Both HDR support and the updated caching system are available in the After Effects Beta.

Finally, Canon’s C80 and C400 cameras can now be used with Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud integration, which allows you to automatically upload files to the Frame.io app directly from the camera. Support for this was rolled out in a Canon firmware update in December, which users will need to install before using the feature.