Adobe is introducing new AI-driven audio editing features to Premiere Pro, aimed at eliminating some of the tedious tasks required to complete editing tasks, such as manually locating specific tools or cleaning up poor-quality dialogue. Currently, the Premiere Pro public beta will offer new workflows, including interactive fade handles that allow users to quickly create custom audio transitions by directly dragging the main editing timeline. Enhanced speech features will also be made available to all Premiere Pro users in the coming weeks.

Other updates to the Premiere Pro public beta include AI-driven audio categorization tags, which can automatically identify and tag clips as dialogue, music, sound effects, or ambient noise. An interactive badge will also be provided to reduce the "mouse movement" required to find specific editing tools. Clicking on the assigned category badge will open the basic sound effects panel, which provides easy one-click access to the most commonly used tools for editing specific types of audio clips. The clip badges have also been redesigned to apply audio effects more quickly and make clips with applied effects easier to identify in the timeline.

Additional quality improvements added to the Premiere Pro public beta include automatic adjustment of waveform (graphical representation of sound) size when adjusting track height in the editing timeline, as well as updated clip colors to make them easier to see. These enhancements should give editors more control over the visual customization of the timeline layout to best suit their individual workflows.

The Premiere Pro public beta is a standalone application that can be used by any user with a Creative Cloud subscription that includes the main Premiere Pro application. Users can install it from the Beta Apps tab in the Creative Cloud desktop launcher, and both versions can coexist on the same system, allowing creatives to experiment with features before they become available in the main Premiere Pro application.

For example, the enhanced speech feature, which automatically cleans up poorly recorded dialogue by removing unwanted background noise and improving overall clarity, will be made available to all Premiere Pro users at some point in February, although Adobe has not specified an exact date. This feature was first introduced in the Premiere Pro public beta in September 2023 and is still available for testing before its official release.

These updates are not meant to fully automate audio editing, but rather to optimize existing processes and give editors more time to work on other projects. "As Premiere Pro becomes the preferred choice for more and more professional editors, we see editors being asked to do more than just cutting footage. To some extent, most editors have to do some color work, audio work, and even titles and basic effects," said Paul Saccone, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Adobe Pro Video.

"Of course, there are still experts who can deliver based on the size of the project, but the more we can make it easier and more intuitive for customers to do this kind of work within Premiere Pro, the more successful they will be in other creative endeavors."