Adobe has released beta versions of Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, and Audition builds with native support for new Apple M1 Macs with much faster media export and scene detection than the software on Intel-based Macs.
The new lineup of beta software from Adobe adds to the choices available to creatives that have upgraded to Apple’s speedy M1 hardware: the Mac mini, 13-inch MacBook Air, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Many creatives could be waiting for the next generation of Apple M-series Macs, which will likely cater to professionals who need higher performance desktop hardware. But the existing lineup has been found to challenge Apple’s high-end Intel based MacBook Pros.
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Adobe launched the beta of Photoshop running on Apple silicon in November, marking an important shift in the software ecosystem around Apple’s chips and a departure from Intel’s chips.
Microsoft had been using Rosetta 2 to translate its Intel-based Office for Arm, but last week released several Office 365 apps with native support for Apple’s Arm-based silicon. It released Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote apps as Universal apps that work on both Apple’s M1 Arm silicon and Intel processors.
The makers of video-calling app Zoom also this week released a new version that supports Apple’s M1 Mac laptops.
Adobe’s M1-native Premiere Pro Beta includes the core editing functions and support for the most widely used codecs: H.264, HEVC, and ProRes.
Adobe’s tests suggest that the H.264 export times for YouTube on the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro are on par with the 16-inch high-end Intel MacBook Pro and easily beat the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel chip.
Adobe also notes that features like Scene Edit Detection gain a performance boost due to the M1 Macs’ machine-learning chops. Googlers recently found that the M1 MacBook Pro with its 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine, easily beat a 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro system with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, 16GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD.
According to Adobe, the M1 native version of Premier Pro’s Scene Edit Detection in Adobe Sensei is completed in 17 seconds versus 71 seconds for the feature on a 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro.
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Adobe Premiere Pro, Audition, and Premiere Rush will have full native support for Apple M1 systems on macOS in the first half of 2021.
The company will begin work on native Apple M1 support for After Effects and Character Animator next year.
