Adobe Project Rush aims to address social media pros' video woes
In addition to giving us a peek at the newest member of Creative Cloud, Adobe delivered updates to the Lightrooms, Spark Post and XD.
With Project Rush, Adobe intends to provide social media professionals a video-editing tool that's both powerful and easy to use -- on any device. The company delivered a peek at the product this week, and is accepting applications for beta testers (Android will be in beta later than iOS), but it's not slated to officially launch until later this year, my guess is at its Adobe Max conference in mid-October.
Rush will be part of a Creative Cloud subscription, but like Adobe's Spark tools will also be available in a standalone subscription; Adobe didn't say how much that will be, but did say it will follow the same pricing structure as many of its other apps. That's likely $10/month or $100/year.
It combines the underlying engines of Adobe's big three video-creation tools -- Premiere Pro (video editing), After Effects (motion graphics) and Audition (audio editing) -- under a simpler, streamlined interface that works on any device. Projects get synced automatically, and when necessary a lot of the heavy lifting is performed in the cloud.
The application is identical on every device, from Android phone to iPad to MacOS and Windows. It supports multiple video layers (four, I think) and two audio tracks, with a timeline view that lets you trim, rearrange and add transitions to video. It incorporates Auto Ducking (balancing audio track volume) and lets you use Motion Graphics Templates created with After Effects -- ones created in-house, third-party templates or those supplied by Adobe. The same goes for presets, which are synced across platforms, too.
Its other perk is a single screen from which you export and upload video directly to multiple platforms, a big convenience as well as space saver on mobile devices.
The ability to export video to multiple formats from a single screen is a really useful capability.
Adobe says that the rendering will be identical across devices as well, but until we actually get to try the app, it's not clear what that means, exactly. And there's one big hole in the launch feature set: GIF creation. Adobe says "it's on the roadmap," but since GIF creation with Adobe products can be a painful process I'm not sure what that will look like.
On mobile devices, Rush will require iOS 11 or later or Android 8 (Oreo) or better. (It uses the Vulkan 1.1 API for GPU acceleration and cross-platform compatibility.)
In other Creative Cloud updates:
- Spark Post, the quick web-page generator, finally enters beta on Android.
- Adobe XD (Experience Design), which recently went free, now lets you create fixed elements, overlays and the ability to share designs privately via a link.
- Lightroom CC (the cloud one) adds preset and profile syncing, auto image tagging, the ability to create presets on mobile and the Healing Brush; on iOS you can now remove chromatic aberration. The app also gets two Technology Previews -- Adobe's "here, test it for us," feature: A Long Exposure feature (iOS) which automatically synthesizes a long-exposure look from a series of photos and guided tutorials.
- Lightroom CC Classic now lets you assign color labels to folders for filtering, batch copy and paste settings and auto-stack HDR and panorama batches. Adobe says it's also sped up searching through folders. There are more updates as well.
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