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Adobe unveiled several new virtual reality (VR), 3D and other features that the company will demonstrate at IBC in Amsterdam Sept. 9-13. “The most important thing for us is delivering the tools that our customers can use to make great entertainment,” Bill Roberts, senior director of product management, told reporters in an online news briefing Sept. 1. To that end, Adobe earlier this year launched VR features that enabled content creators to work with VR media directly, so they could edit sequences, apply special effects and output 360-degree projects tagged properly for media players, it said.

To enhance VR capabilities further, the next release of Adobe’s Premiere Pro Creative Cloud (CC) video editing software includes an auto-aware VR feature that it said in a Sept. 6 news release seamlessly detects and applies the correct setting to stereoscopic and monoscopic media. Capabilities in the Adobe Primetime video platform allow media companies to “capture the full potential of VR by building sustainable businesses and delivering premium viewing experiences” that include video playback support, dynamic ad insertion and content protection via Adobe’s VR digital rights management (DRM), it said.

“VR is a big buzzword,” and Adobe has been involved with some high-profile VR projects in the past year, Roberts told reporters without naming any of the projects. With VR, he said: “We’re there. We’re moving with our customers, and delivering to all the top platforms.”

Adobe offers an “end-to-end workflow” solution, so users can edit content in Premiere and also “push it out” to wherever it will be viewed, such as Facebook or YouTube, with the correct metadata tags, he said. Users can also push through to Adobe Primetime and distribute that content and be able to take advantage of Adobe Analytics features, he said.

Primetime DRM was the “cornerstone” of the over-the-top delivery of the Rio Olympics content, he said. Adobe sees over-the-top services growing “at a tremendous rate,” and Primetime is being chosen at an increasingly high rate because it supports so many over-the-top services, including Apple TV and Google Chromecast, he said.

Premium ad-supported viewing on connected devices is now supported in Primetime, enabling media companies to deliver quality and buffer-free experiences, while “weaving content and ads together into a single stream,” Adobe said in the news release.

As part of an effort to help accelerate 3D content creation, Adobe is also now offering a 3D rendering engine that it said increases the pace and efficiency of 3D content creation. Artists can also now create editable 3D elements including text and shape layers intuitively from within Adobe’s After Effects CC digital effects and motion graphics application with new Cinerender technology from 3D software developer MAXON, Adobe said.

Performance improvements with real-time playback in a new After Effects video preview architecture allows users to play raw footage in real-time, doing away with the need to cache before previewing footage, Adobe said. GPU-accelerated effects also enable faster render compositions, it said.

In addition, animation and puppet creation with Adobe’s Character Animator live-motion capture tool will be improved through integrated round-trip functionality between Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Illustrator CC, it said.

“Adobe’s multiscreen solution helps media companies connect with their audiences in a personalized way by delivering compelling experiences and adopting immersive capabilities” including 3D, VR and augmented reality, Roberts said in the news release. Video editors from Hollywood to Sundance to YouTube are taking note of Adobe CC, most recently with Disney’s remake of the movie Pete’s Dragon, Adobe said.

“Going into IBC, one of the big themes is connection,” Roberts told reporters. All of Adobe’s desktop tools have evolved now “to either connect to one another or connect to rich services in the cloud, and what that’s done is [it’s] allowed us to bring together teams – and those teams no longer have to be co-located,” he said, adding that those teams can now be “scattered around the planet.”

Increasingly, Adobe’s customers need to not only deliver the video experience, but also connect to their audiences, he said. It’s become a “much more dynamic connection and they’re actually trying to tie in across all the different social channels,” he said. Therefore, “our big themes are tools, teams and audience,” and it’s “all about connection,” he said.

The primary Adobe video tools used to create content on are Premiere, After Effects and Audition, he went on to say, pointing out that video creators are among the “most voracious users of tools.” On average, they use eight of Adobe’s CC applications, he said.

Adobe is taking things that used to be a server in a facility and starting to provide them as cloud services that people can connect into and that can increase workflow, he said. One of the biggest successes that Adobe has had in that area has been Libraries, where the user can take a collection of assets and share them with team members and it’s all embedded in the desktop experience, he said.

Among the other new Adobe announcements ahead of IBC, the new hosted collaboration service Team Projects “builds upon the experience we’ve had delivering Adobe Anywhere to our on-premise clients – people who actually put an Anywhere server in their facility,” Roberts told reporters.

Team Projects “offers many of the same capabilities,” but now as a cloud service, he said. “What this allows is simultaneous access to projects,” so there are no longer separate project files everywhere — “everybody just ties into a shared team project,” he said. “For video users, this is really an important part of the workflow” and Team Projects allows everybody to work at the same time on their individual parts of the project and “continue to iterate on their work,” he said, adding this “works extremely well” with Adobe’s proxy technologies.

“One of the trends we’ve seen in this industry is a move to 4K, 8K – extremely large images,” Roberts said. The resulting challenges include the fact that, “for the most part, many screens can’t even display all the pixels,” he said. Working with proxies lets users reduce their storage footprint while working, he said.

Team Projects addresses the challenge of working with other editors and designers across multiple projects and tools, Adobe said in its news release. Built on Adobe Anywhere technology, Team Projects integrates deep collaboration features including version control and smart conflict resolutions, and allows editors and motion graphics artists to work at the same time within Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC and Adobe Prelude CC, it said. The data in Team Projects will also be securely hosted in the cloud and media files referenced by Team Projects can be locally stored source files or shared lightweight proxies, it said.

With Adobe Premiere, the company is “continuing to drive leadership in the Ultra HD and High Dynamic Range workflow space,” Roberts said. To that end, refined Lumetri Color tools in Premiere Pro CC provides HDR 10 metadata support for editing and delivering HDR 10 for new HDR-enabled TVs and other displays, along with expanded support for color space metadata, “providing greater precision for delivering brilliant imagery,” Adobe said in the news release.

Better captions and subtitles in Premiere Pro CC enables users to easily create and fine-tune captions to enliven silent auto-play video previews on Facebook for higher engagement, target different languages, or improve accessibility for hearing impaired viewers, Adobe said.

With Adobe Audition, the company is offering “another big push to make getting started with a digital audio workstation much easier,” Roberts said. There’s also a “focus on performance and streamlining the experience,” as well as adding new audio features to Premiere, he said.

Character Animator is also getting a lot of new features, he said. As examples, he said, “getting started is much easier” now and it’s also supporting more languages.