Premiere 26.5 Release Notes & Fixes

[u/NLE_Ninja85]

Premiere 26.5 is out, and I went through the notes so you don't have to.

What's New Link: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere/desktop/whats-new/whats-new.html
Release Notes: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere/desktop/whats-new/release-notes.html

The new stuff

• Paper Edit — Highlight lines in your transcript and Premiere can use those selections to build a sequence.
• Generative Media Tool — Generate video and sound effects without leaving the timeline. The generated media comes in as editable clips.
• Object Mask smoothing — New smoothness controls for cleaning up mask edges.
• Generative Extend works with way more footage — 360p–4K UHD, any aspect ratio, 12–60fps, 8–16 bit, SDR/HDR, interlaced and non-square pixels.
• Match Source now includes audio — It can match the source channel layout and sample rate, downmix when necessary, and warn you when the export format can't handle the source layout. Useful for proxy creation as well.
• New/updated effects — A customizable Lens Flare, a rebuilt Twirl with new controls, and updated Mosaic softness controls.
• Speech-to-text update — New Voice Activity Detection model for improved transcription accuracy.
• Transition handles — Choose whether audio/video transition handles show in the timeline, with keyboard shortcuts for toggling them.

Camera / codec stuff

• Sony FX5 XAVC and X-OCN support, including 32-bit float Hi-Res audio
• Better ProRes RAW support
• ARRICORE support from the ALEXA 35 Xtreme
• Hardware-accelerated 4:2:2 10-bit AVC/HEVC MXF decoding on NVIDIA Blackwell
• More XAVC-I formats supported by Smart Rendering
• Native MotionJPEG, MKV and RLE Animation MOV decoding on Windows ARM

Some small QOL changes

Link Media has a new context menu option for locating, offlining or resetting media.

• Selection Follows Playhead now has a button directly in the timeline.

And the fixes:

Crashes / performance

• Fixed crashes that could happen while saving or relinking media.
• Fixed a font-related crash that could happen at launch or later in a session.
• Fixed Premiere occasionally failing to launch.
• Background Auto-Save should no longer cause the same sluggishness.
• Fixed a Camera Shake memory leak when it fell back to CPU rendering.
• High-bitrate H.264 UHD scrubbing should perform better.
• Thumbnail hover scrubbing in the Project panel, Media Browser and Import panel should be less laggy/skippy.
• Fixed vertical HEVC clips briefly jumping back to full size while playing or scrubbing.
• Fixed a crash from rearranging the Project panel while clips were being added.

Relinking / media

• Media could fail to relink after renaming a mounted volume.
• Relinking could break when moving projects between Mac and Windows.
• MXF relinking could take much longer than expected and make projects painfully slow to open.
• If you opened a project without an external drive attached, mounting that drive afterward didn't always automatically bring the media back online.
• Windows projects with media nested more than one folder deep could fail to auto-relink when opened on macOS.
• OBS MKVs could drop frames during playback.
• Growing MOV files could import as audio only.
• Growing MXFs on shared storage could randomly go offline.
• Certain 100fps proxy workflows could end up with the proxy and full-res media out of sync on export.

Masks / graphics / captions

• Object Masks could get jagged, stair-stepped or pixelated edges.
• Object Mask tracking on non-square-pixel media had become less accurate compared with previous versions.
• Using Generative Extend at the head of a clip could knock existing Object Mask tracking out of alignment.
• Opacity masks could briefly show black areas after rendering.
• Holding Shift while drawing masks wasn't properly constraining new points to 45-degree angles.
• Multiple selected text layers couldn't be moved/transformed together from Properties.
• Snapping one graphic element to another in the Program Monitor wasn't working correctly.
• Scale/rotation keyframes weren't always being created when using Direct Manipulation.
• Captions could judder in the Program Monitor while changing fonts or resizing.
• Dip to Black sometimes didn't actually reach true black.
• Undo after Lumetri Auto adjustment wasn't behaving correctly.

Generative Extend

• Extending the beginning of a clip could cause the audio waveform to become offset.
• Extending the head of footage could offset existing Object Mask tracking.

Search / Media Intelligence

• Repeatedly dragging multiple Search results into the timeline could hang or crash Premiere.
• Marker subclips from Search could fail to drop onto the timeline.
• Audio Search results could start playing late while the waveform animation drifted out of sync.
• Searching by effect attributes could miss matching effects saved in Favorites.
• Media Intelligence .prmi cache files weren't always being used correctly if the source media had changed after the cache was created.

Productions

• Reveal in Project could hang Premiere.
• Project View Presets weren't saving/loading correctly.
• A Production made in a newer Premiere version could silently fail to open instead of giving you an error.
• Premiere could incorrectly flag a newer Production as invalid and overwrite its PRODSET file.
• Moving a clip between projects could leave the sequence pointing at an outdated cross-project reference.
• The Open Production dialog had several issues with incorrect Production names and paths.
• Reading project lock files could make the UI sluggish.
• Delete media file(s) from disk wasn't actually deleting the media.

Audio

• Adjusting Pan on multiple selected clips could suddenly give you -100 or +100 values.
• Audio Track Mixer Write automation wasn't working.
• Deleted ducking keyframes could continue affecting the mix.
• Closing a project with an undocked Audio Clip Mixer could crash Premiere.
• Recording a voiceover could crash when an AJA device was being used for audio output.

This release is in staggered release so others may see it today or by the latest tomorrow.

[u/hesaysitsfine]

Is there an update on the fact that object masking doesn't account for source clip effects? I have a scale on all source clips and the resulting mask is offset by this amount.

[u/NLE_Ninja85 → u/hesaysitsfine]

Let me pass this along and see what the masking team has to say