As filmmakers gather for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival—where 85 percent of premiering films were made using Adobe Creative Cloud—Adobe continues to power the workflows editors rely on to bring stories to screen. Today's major updates to Premiere Pro and After Effects give editors and motion designers faster, more intuitive ways to work while maintaining creative flow and intent.
AI-Powered Object Masking: Hover and Click Precision
The new AI-powered Object Mask in Premiere Pro makes creating perfect masks of complex moving subjects remarkably easy. Simply hover and click to generate precise masks in seconds. With colored visual overlays, powerful mask refinement tools, and fast tracking, creating custom effects is now more efficient and enjoyable than ever.
From the toolbar, editors can quickly create an Object Mask, allowing them to mask and track any person or object moving through a clip with ease. As you hover across your frame, visual overlays snap into place, identifying the person or object you want to mask. Six different colored overlays or a black-and-white alpha view enable effective mask preview.
Fast lasso and rectangular editing tools allow adding or subtracting areas from the Object Mask, while feathering and resizing controls ensure a perfect fit. The feather and expansion controls soften and resize the mask for seamless integration—less fiddling, more creating.
Object Mask uses a new assistive AI model from Adobe that's entirely on-device. Like all Adobe AI tools and models, customer data is never used for training.
Redesigned Shape Masks with 20x Faster Tracking
The Shape Masks editors have relied on for years just received a significant upgrade. Redesigned Ellipse, Rectangle, and Pen masks offer more creative control for effects such as blurring faces, relighting sections of frames, and more. With tracking that's up to 20x faster than previous versions, editors spend less time watching status bars and more time creating.
Creating Shape Masks is now easier with the ability to generate them directly from the toolbar, just like Object Mask. Improved creative controls in the program monitor enable resizing, moving, rotating, and feathering masks with greater precision. Redesigned Bezier curves ensure smoother mask customization, while colored overlay options allow effective mask preview. Multiple masks can be added, subtracted, and mixed together using different blend modes.
Bi-directional tracking allows finding the perfect starting frame to track forward and backward with one click. 3D perspective tracking anchors masks to surfaces of screens, walls, rotating faces, or any desired element. Real-time frames-per-second display shows exactly how fast masks are tracking.
Community feedback requested live tracking previews—Adobe delivered. Watch mask playback as it tracks to visually identify areas needing additional refinement once tracking completes.
With the new "Frame" track editing mode, tracks that are almost perfect no longer require manually adjusting every keyframe. Make changes, and Premiere effortlessly combines corrections with tracked keyframes, reducing dozens of manual adjustments to just two or three.
Firefly Boards: From Ideation to Timeline
Firefly Boards is an AI-first space where users can explore, iterate, and collaborate in real time. In pre-production, Board's ideation tools make finding and communicating the right visual style and composition easier. Assets can be generated for pitches, treatments, and storyboards without leaving the board. In post-production, scenes and ideas can be laid out to better understand what's been shot. If specific shots are missing or to try out effects, media can be generated directly within the project's context.
With this update, getting media from Firefly Boards to Premiere is easier. With a click, one or multiple assets are sent directly into the current Premiere project, where all professional editing tools seamlessly blend generated assets into projects.
Frame.io V4 Panel: Collaboration Without Leaving Premiere
Collaboration just received a serious upgrade. The new Frame.io V4 panel (beta) keeps editors in the edit while bringing in comments, media, and versioning. Ingest assets, share cuts, and sync notes without leaving Premiere.
Exporting a sequence? Versions automatically stack in Frame.io. Feedback shows up directly on the timeline. Notes stay live as editing continues. It's a smoother loop between editors and teams. And yes, Frame.io comes included with Creative Cloud at no additional cost.
Adobe Stock Integration: No More Workflow Interruption
Need footage to fill a gap? Adobe Stock is now fully integrated inside Premiere like never before. Browse over 52 million clips (including 92,000 free ones), and preview, license, and import them without breaking focus.
After Effects 26.0: Major Motion Design Upgrades
On top of Premiere Pro innovations, After Effects 26.0 unveils one of its biggest slates of updates, opening exciting new creative possibilities for motion designers and visual storytellers.
Enhanced Vector Workflows
Vector workflows in After Effects are smoother than ever. Import SVG files—a common file type used by graphic designers in Adobe Illustrator—as native shape layers and start animating with full vector fidelity. When converting Illustrator layers to shape layers, gradients and transparency are preserved and remain editable, enabling keyframed color transitions and animated gradient motion. New gradient scale and rotation properties provide more creative control for fills and strokes.
Create Native 3D Parametric Meshes
Design in 3D with parametric meshes created from scratch inside After Effects. Build and customize cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, toris, and planes. Combine shapes like building blocks to craft stylized graphics or photorealistic set pieces. New Spot and Parallel shadows enhance scene realism and dynamics.
Style Scenes with 1,300+ Free Substance 3D Materials
Access and apply Substance 3D materials to both native meshes and imported models to add depth and realism in just a few clicks. These materials are dynamic and customizable, allowing tweaking to fit creative visions. After Effects provides access to thousands of materials via Substance Community Assets, with over 1,300 free materials available for all users. Offset, rotation, and scale controls dial in desired looks, and any property of materials can be animated to bring them to life.
Upgraded Motion Typography with Variable Fonts
Motion typography in After Effects received a major upgrade. Using the Text Animator, every axis a variable font exposes can now be animated with keyframes and expressions. Adjust weight, width, slant, wiggle, and any designer-defined font axes in the Properties Panel, and drive them through the Essential Graphics panel and Motion Graphics templates for flexible titles and templates.
Quality of Life Improvements
Sometimes smaller updates make the biggest impact. The new Unmult effect quickly composites footage with solid black or white backgrounds by removing pixels based on brightness thresholds, making keying complex clips containing fire and smoke easier. Three new audio effects—Gate, Compressor, and Distortion—make cleaning up and shaping sound easier without leaving After Effects.
High Performance Preview Playback is faster than ever, extending preview durations while using significantly less disk space with no loss in visual fidelity. Native WinARM support improves performance on next-generation PCs. Reorganized preferences provide quicker access to comp and project settings, and keyframe referencing in expressions is now simpler.
Availability
The new Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects 26.0 are available starting today. Head to the Creative Cloud app to update and explore these powerful new capabilities.
The Bottom Line
These updates reflect Adobe's deep understanding of editor and motion designer workflows. By introducing AI-powered tools that enhance rather than replace creative decision-making, redesigning core features for speed and precision, and integrating collaboration and asset management directly into editing environments, Adobe continues to define the future of video production.
For editors working on everything from feature films to social media content, these tools represent significant leaps in capability, efficiency, and creative control—ensuring Adobe remains the essential platform for bringing stories to screen.
Source: Adobe Blog