Converting a 16:9 video to a vertical or square shot and back again is about to get simpler, thanks to artificial intelligence. On Friday, September 13, Adobe teased a new Auto Reframe tool headed to Premiere Pro before the end of the year. Powered by artificial intelligence, the upcoming tool analyzes the footage to keep the subject within the crop.
Unlike basic tools that simply crop to the middle, Auto Reframe analyzes the footage and pans the crop to keep the main portion of the frame within the shot. Powered by Adobe Sensei, the tool first analyzes the footage, looking for the movement within the frame. Based on that movement, the tool can then crop the video to the selected aspect ratio, panning to follow the movement instead of inadvertently cropping it out. Multiple Auto Reframes can be applied to a single project, allowing users to export the video to multiple aspect ratios.
The upcoming tool will be part of the software’s effects — users drag and drop the Auto Reframe effect over the clip to apply the adjustment. Adobe’s Premiere Pro is designed for high-end video editing, however, so the developers included options to adjust the results. Editors can choose from a slow- or fast-motion preset to create a more accurate result from the start.
The automatically generated keyframes can also be adjusted manually, allowing for more control or to fix any mistakes from the A.I. A nesting option allows editors to preserve manual crops.
Auto Reframe will also resize titling and motion graphics with the automatic edit as well.
Adobe says the tool is designed to help save time over the often tedious process of manually adjusting a video’s aspect ratio, a practice that’s common for creating a single video designed for multiple platforms, such as putting the same video designed for YouTube on IGTV.
The new tool, originally teased as “Smooth Operator” at Adobe MAX 2018, stems from Adobe Sensei, the company’s A.I. framework. The Auto Reframe joins tools like Content-Aware Fill, using machine learning to streamline some common editing tasks.
The tool was teased during IBC 2019, a media, entertainment, and technology conference held from September 13 to September 19 in Amsterdam.
