Revolutionizing Video Editing with AI-Powered Masking and Motion Design
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 and After Effects introduce faster, more intuitive creative tools while maintaining creative flow and intent.
These updates open entirely new ways to tell stronger stories with effects: relight a subject, blur a background, isolate a color grade, or design custom effects in seconds. Because masks are now faster, more flexible, and more accurate, they become building blocks of creativity instead of roadblocks to workflow.
Create Perfect Masks with AI-Powered Object Mask
Premiere's new AI-powered Object Mask makes creating precise masks of complex moving subjects easier than ever. Simply hover and click to generate perfect masks in seconds. With colored visual overlays, powerful refinement tools, and fast tracking, creating unique effects is more efficient and enjoyable.
From the toolbar, you can quickly create an Object Mask, allowing you to mask and track any person or object moving through your clip with ease. As you hover across your frame, visual overlays snap into place, identifying the person or object you want to mask. Choose from six different colored overlays or a black-and-white alpha view to preview your Object Mask.
You can add or subtract areas from the Object Mask using fast lasso and rectangular editing tools and easily adjust with feathering and resizing controls. The feather and expansion controls allow you to soften and resize the Object Mask, ensuring a perfect fit.
Object Mask uses a new assistive AI model from Adobe. It's entirely on-device, and like all Adobe AI tools, customer data is never used for training.
Redesigned Shape Masks Track Up to 20× Faster
The Shape Masks you've been using for years just got a serious upgrade in Premiere. Redesigned Ellipse, Rectangle, and Pen masks offer more creative control for blurring faces, relighting sections of your frame, and more. With tracking up to 20× faster than previous versions, you'll spend less time waiting.
Creating Shape Masks is now easier and faster with the ability to generate them directly from the toolbar. You can resize, move, rotate, and feather masks with improved creative controls, giving you greater precision. Redesigned Bezier curves ensure smoother customization, while colored overlays allow effective previews. Add, subtract, and mix multiple masks together using different blend modes for enhanced creative possibilities.
Bi-directional tracking allows you to find the perfect starting frame to track forward and backward with one click. 3D perspective tracking lets you anchor masks to surfaces of screens, walls, rotating faces, or anything you want. You can even see exactly how fast your mask is tracking in frames-per-second.
Live tracking previews let you watch playback of your mask as it tracks, visually identifying areas that may need refinement. With the new "Frame" track editing mode, you don't need to manually adjust every single tracked keyframe—make your changes, and Premiere effortlessly combines corrections with tracked keyframes.
Seamless Integration with Firefly Boards
Firefly Boards is an AI-first space for exploration, iteration, and real-time collaboration. In pre-production, Board's ideation tools make it easier to find and communicate the right visual style and composition. You can generate assets for pitches, treatments, and storyboards without leaving the board.
With this update, getting media from Firefly Boards to Premiere is effortless. With a click, one or multiple assets transfer directly into your current Premiere project, where you can use all professional editing tools to blend generated assets seamlessly.
Enhanced Collaboration with Frame.io V4 Panel (Beta)
Collaboration just got a serious upgrade. The new Frame.io V4 panel keeps you in the edit while bringing in comments, media, and versioning. Ingest assets, share cuts, and sync notes without ever leaving Premiere.
Exported sequences automatically stack as versions in Frame.io. Feedback shows up right on your timeline. Notes stay live as you keep editing—creating a smoother loop between you and your team. Frame.io comes included with Creative Cloud at no additional cost.
Adobe Stock Integration
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: Massive Motion Design Updates
After Effects 26.0 delivers one of its biggest update slates, 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 (commonly 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 keyframe color transitions and animated gradient motion. New gradient scale and rotation properties give you more creative control for fills and strokes.
Native 3D Parametric Meshes
Design in 3D with parametric meshes created from scratch inside After Effects. Build and customize cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, tori, and planes. Combine shapes like building blocks to craft stylized graphics or photorealistic set pieces. New Spot and Parallel shadows enhance realism and scene 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 you to tweak them to fit your vision. After Effects provides access to thousands of materials via Substance Community Assets, with over 1,300 free materials available for all users. Use offset, rotation, and scale controls to dial in the look you want, and animate any property to bring materials to life.
Upgraded Motion Typography with Variable Fonts
Motion typography in After Effects just got a major upgrade. Using the Text Animator, you can now animate every axis a variable font exposes 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—perfect for keying complex clips containing fire and smoke.
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.
Plus, 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.
Available Now
Adobe Premiere and After Effects 26.0 are available starting today. Head to your Creative Cloud app to update and experience these powerful new creative tools.