Adobe has announced a raft of new features for Premiere and After Effects at Adobe MAX 2026, with AI unsurprisingly taking center stage. There are plenty more ways to use Firefly to generate content, but this year, Adobe has also focused on using AI to take some of the more tedious jobs out of video editing.
Perhaps the most useful time saver is the expanded Adobe Creative Agent, which powers a new AI assistant in Premiere capable of handling complex editing tasks using simple conversational prompts. This includes organizing footage into bins, assembling sequences from the best takes, tracking subjects across frames, applying color corrections to multiple clips, and even syncing multiple cameras and audio recordings.
During a briefing ahead of Adobe MAX, I watched Adobe demonstrate the assistant syncing three camera angles and their audio into a fully editable multicam clip with a single instruction. Anyone who has spent hours manually syncing footage will certainly appreciate this new tool.
Editors can also create reusable AI "skills" to automate specific workflows, such as applying a studio's naming conventions or organizing footage in a particular way, while providing scripts, PDFs, and other documents gives the assistant additional context about a project.
Gen-AI comes to Premiere
Of course, Adobe's generative AI isn't far away, and Generative Remove is arriving in Premiere Beta. Using the existing object masking tools, editors can select and track unwanted objects before AI removes them and fills in the background, all without leaving the timeline or affecting the rest of the clip.
Adobe demonstrated this by removing a passing car from a video, although the feature could just as easily be used to remove an unwanted boom microphone or distracting logo. Of course, how convincingly it handles more complicated scenes remains to be seen.
Generate audio to match your video
Premiere's Generative Media tools are also expanding, allowing editors to create video, music, sound effects, and entire soundscapes directly on the timeline. The tools can use the visual context of the existing edit to generate content, with a choice of AI models from Adobe Firefly and partners including Google, Kling, Runway, and Luma.
The soundscape generator is particularly interesting, analyzing video footage before generating four separate audio tracks that editors can individually adjust and mix, potentially saving considerable time searching for and layering sound effects.
There is certainly no shortage of AI in Adobe's latest updates. Personally, I have very little interest in AI making creative decisions for me, but I would happily hand over the hours spent organizing footage, syncing cameras, and fixing troublesome audio.
These are the jobs nobody particularly enjoys, yet they take up so much of the editing process. If Adobe can reliably take care of the tedious work while leaving the actual creativity to the editor, then this is the kind of AI revolution I can get behind.
