Adobe brings text-based editing to Premiere Pro

If you have ever had to sit through hours of raw interview footage just to find a three-second sound bite, you know how painful building a rough cut can be.

Ahead of NAB 2023, Adobe revealed a feature for Premiere Pro designed to eliminate that exact headache. They call it Text-Based Editing, and it basically turns video editing into editing a text document.

Cut video by copying and pasting

Powered by Adobe Sensei, the tool automatically transcribes source footage upon import. Instead of scrubbing endlessly across the timeline, you simply read through the transcript and search for keywords.

When you find the line you want, you add it to the timeline. Even better, editing works both ways. If you cut, copy, or paste phrases inside the sequence transcript, the video clips on your timeline automatically rearrange themselves to match. Once your cut is locked, that same transcript doubles as an instant set of captions.

Speech to Text also picked up four new languages: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish, bringing the total to 18.

Beyond transcriptions, Adobe tackled several everyday friction points. Automatic tone mapping lets editors drop iPhone HLG or Sony S-Log footage into standard sequences without destructive LUT conversions. There is also background auto-save, GPU acceleration for ARRI and RED, and sequence locking for teams.

After Effects turns 30

To mark the 30th anniversary of After Effects, Adobe introduced a new Properties panel borrowed from Photoshop and Illustrator.

Instead of twirling open dozens of layer twirl-downs to tweak a property, controls now appear contextually right next to the composition window. It works seamlessly with Essential Properties, making graphic versioning much faster.

For high-end pipelines, After Effects now includes native support for ACES and OpenColorIO, ensuring color fidelity when handing projects between different VFX facilities. Adobe also added diagnostic tools for troubleshooting wonky plugins and promised over 50 new animation presets later this year.

Features like automatic tone mapping and ACES are rolling out now, while Text-Based Editing and the Properties panel are in public beta ahead of a May launch.

Why it matters

For documentary makers, podcasters, and YouTube creators who deal with talking heads all day, this is a massive workflow upgrade. Assembling a rough cut from a multi-hour interview used to eat up an entire afternoon; now it takes a search bar and a few keystrokes.

For the wider creative software market, Adobe is clearly moving to neutralize a wave of dedicated AI transcription and "paper cut" startups. Why export footage to a third-party transcription app when Premiere Pro can parse the words and move the clips directly inside the timeline?

We think this is one of Adobe's smartest AI implementations yet. Rather than chasing flashy text-to-video gimmicks, they targeted the most tedious administrative chore in post-production. The real test will be how well the transcription handles noisy environments and overlapping speech, but integrating text-driven rough cuts natively into a major NLE is a win for practical creative work.