Not surprisingly, Adobe is working on adding Apple Silicon/M1 processor support to its applications. The company on Monday offered a nifty limited beta to Premiere, its Mac video editing software, as well as Rush and its Audition audio editing tool.
As with Photoshop, Adobe is offering a phrased approach to the transition, its initial betas supporting only a limited number of features.
The company offered the following comments in a blog post:
Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, and Audition builds with native support for new Apple M1 chipsets are available in public Beta today. The new Apple M1 platform offers improved performance and greater energy efficiency.
The M1-native Premiere Pro Beta includes the core editing functions and support for the most widely used codecs: H.264, HEVC, and ProRes. Since Premiere Pro is built on a large codebase with support for a wide range of media and functions, we are taking a phased approach as we build out native Apple M1 support. This allows us to validate performance for specific parts of the application before we add new components.
Users should note that the Premiere Pro Beta for Apple M1 incorporates the latest builds of our new captions workflow, which requires a project file format upgrade. We recommend creating a copy of current projects for Beta testing to avoid compatibility issues for any ongoing production work.
Limitations for the initial Premiere Pro Beta on Apple M1 hardware include third party integrations, such as Transmit reference monitoring hardware, plugins, extension panels, and control surfaces
In recent tests, YouTube export times for the M1 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro were more than twice as fast as the latest Intel version, and similar to that of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Other features such as scene edit detection proved dramatically faster thanks to the machine-learning features built into the M1 chip. Adobe notes that the existing version of the app still gets some of this speed improvement when running under Rosetta 2.
Adobe has stated that users can expect versions of its applications with native M1 support in the first half of 2021. In the meantime, applications will run under Rosetta 2 support with almost all functionality. Adobe has cited that there’s currently an issue with the Roto Brush 2 tool, and that it hasn’t tested third-party integrations.
If you’ve had a chance to test the betas on Apple Silicon hardware, please let us know about your experience in the comments.
Via 9to5Mac and blog.adobe.com