#444 – Recent developments
Last week was NAB, the biggest in-person show of the year for Production and Post.
All of the major NLE's announced new features, some of which were previously available in beta.
Many of these new AI features, such as Adobe's Generative Extend or Resolve's Set Extension are free, for now, but they will likely start charging somewhere along the line for cloud compute costs etc.
You've been warned.
I'll hit you with the highlights and share some excellent resources to help you dive into the details at your own pace.
- DaVinci Resolve 20
- Adobe Premiere Pro 25.2.1
- Avid Media Composer 2024.12
- Final Cut Pro 11.1
- Strada Agents
- Frame.io Updates
- Generative Video Updates
Here's a good recap of what NAB was like on the ground.
Did you know this was a huge week for new trailers?
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
Superman sneak peak
Tron: Ares
Murderbot and many more!
Don't get left behind – sign up to This Week in Movie Trailers (it's free!) and have the biggest new trailers delivered to your inbox each week.
NAB Deals and Discounts
It's always a good time of year to save, although many of these deals end in the next few days.
- Ripple Training 30% off training with code: NAB-2025
- Boris FX - 25% off renewals
- Video Copilot - 25% off all products
- 50% off selected iZotope audio plugins
DaVinci Resolve 20 Adds Major AI Features
Headline: DaVinci Resolve 20 (public beta 1) launched with over 100 new features and improvements including major new AI powered capabilities.
Details:
- Improved keyframing with dedicated curve view and timeline drawer.
- Voice over tool with record and monitor options.
- Import Blackmagic Cloud Shared folders to media pool.
- AI IntelliScript creates timelines with a user provided script.
- AI Magic Mask v2 with paint brush.
- AI Dialogue Matcher matches clip tone, level and reverberance.
- AI Audio Assistant automatically creates a finished mix.
- AI IntelliCut removes silences and checkerboards speakers.
- Deep image compositing toolset.
Dive in:
- Official downloads and feature list
- Creative Video Tips - 13 new AI features explored
- Ripple Training's Resolve 20 favourite new features
- Will BMD charge for Studio updates?
- Colorist Darren Mostyn's Favourite Features
- Team2Films 4x New Features Videos
Premiere 2025
Headline: Adobe Premiere Pro's (25.2.1) new AI features could be incredibly useful if they work well; extend shots with frames you don't have, search media visually, auto translate captions and improved colour management.
Generative Extend uses Adobe's Firefly model and is ‘free for now’ while Media Intelligence can run locally on your offline machine.
I've not played with either yet but questions I have include:
- How long does it take to index material (per hour?)
- Does it matter on what kind of file?
- How big is the media intelligence file?
- How good does the extend look?
- How accurate is the translation?
This also means that if you open a project and everything slows down you should check to see what background actions left on by default (auto tagging, auto analysis, auto transcription, etc.) are hogging your computer's juice.
Dive in:
Avid Media Composer
Headline: Avid Media Composer's latest version is 2024.12 (released in February 2025) and now officially runs natively on Apple Silicon. Which is nice.
There's not much more to talk about that you probably don't already know and, in fact, I covered many of the new features back in #439 – This wasn't possible until now.
Dive in:
Final Cut Pro
Headline: Not a major update but Final Cut Pro 11.1 now includes:
- Add colour corrections and effects to new adjustment clips.
- Speed up your Magnetic Mask workflows with important bug fixes, performance improvements and a new keyboard shortcut to show or hide the Magnetic Mask Editor.
- Use the Quantec QRS (Quantec Room Simulator) effect to create natural and transparent audio reverbs that simulate real acoustic spaces.
- Stay organised by renaming audio effects in the inspector.
- Reveal the source of a multicam angle or synced clip in the browser.
- Move markers in the timeline by dragging them in a clip, or remove markers by dragging them out of a clip.
Dive in:
Strada Agents - Be Your Own Cloud
Headline: Strada Agents launch in beta, giving you the ability to remotely access your media without the cloud. You can try it for yourself today.
You can now link to your media from pretty much any source including:
- External hard drives
- SAN, NAS, RAIDs etc.
- LucidLink filespaces
- Dropbox etc.
Recommended spec includes any M-series Mac, hardline internet and setting your external drives never to sleep.
- Invites
- Collaborators
- Downloads
- Commenting
Frame.io Updates
- Additional storage on all Pro (2TB), Team (3TB) and Enterprise tiers at no additional cost.
- Transcription (beta) with search, range based comments, batch processing, SRT and VTT export and support for 18 languages.
- Text mark up tools - Search and select text in any document, add comments, add, delete and highlight text sections.
- Apple TV app
- Static watermarks
- Restricted folders
Frame.io v4 is a major leap forward compared to the pre-Adobe-purchase version.
AI Tools Updated
Some quick headlines on the generative AI front:
- Chat-GPT gives image generation to everyone with viral effects.
- Runway.ml's video generation engine hits version 4 with more consistent and controllable characters, locations and objects across scenes.
- Artlist now features native video and image generation (plus these other cool features)
So remember, change is the only constant and cut daily.
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