Adobe opened its MAX conference in Miami Beach this week with a number a lot of creators will recognize. In a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. creators that Adobe ran with The Harris Poll in October, 34% of full-time creators said they had turned down a paid video job in the past three months because they didn’t feel they had the skills to deliver it.
That gap gets expensive fast, because video is where creators see their growth coming from. Sixty-five percent of creators in the survey said making more video is important to their goals. The skills they most wanted help with were adding effects or removing unwanted details, editing clips into a complete story and cleaning up audio.
Much of what Adobe showed at MAX goes straight at that list, starting with the phone in your pocket. Premiere mobile is free, and on Nov. 10 it added hundreds of thousands of songs from Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group on iPhone in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. You can use up to 60 seconds of a track per video, search by artist or title and browse collections curated by the labels. Android is coming later.
The songs are licensed for personal posts, so sponsored and client videos still need commercial music, the same rule TikTok and Instagram already follow. Adobe points paid projects to its Adobe Stock Audio library.
Adobe is also testing AI that takes on the editing grunt work, starting with a Premiere mobile feature called Quick Cuts. You pick clips from your camera roll, describe the video you want and get an editable first cut. It can also turn one long video into several Shorts. The feature is in closed beta for now.
Premiere’s new AI assistant, in beta, can carry out multi-step requests like applying an effect to every clip in a sequence or matching color and exposure across an edit. Generative Remove, also in beta, lets you mask an object, track it through a shot and erase it. That’s one of the skills creators most wanted help with.
Among creators in Adobe’s survey who have used an agent for creative work, 26% said it let them take on a type of paid project they couldn’t before, and 59% said agents save them time overall. Creators still want to stay in charge, though. Seventy-seven percent said the final creative decision should always belong to a human.
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Wednesday night’s Sneaks show, hosted by Terry Crews, previews where this could go next. Project Scene Sweep understands the characters and locations across a sequence, so a single edit carries across cuts and camera angles.
Project Sound Bender lets you describe a sound and pull it out of a finished mix. Sneaks are experiments, but some become real products. Last year’s Firefly Graph launched this week. This year, for the first time, anyone can try two of the projects, Project Deep Brush and Project Hands On, in the new Adobe Labs Playground.
