Premiere Pro Media Intelligence, What Is It?

What is Media Intelligence?

The Adobe Premiere Pro team announced a new technology in December 2024 called Media Intelligence and Search Panel. This tool utilizes AI to analyze and categorize footage through semantic mapping, allowing users to search for their assets using keywords and phrases within the search panel. It is currently available to test in Beta Version 25.2.0 (Build 126) and can be found in preferences under a new category titled “Media Analysis & Transcription.”

In this post, we want to focus on how Media Intelligence uses hardware to analyze footage. For now, evaluating the effectiveness of metadata results or the search panel’s functionality is secondary, especially as it is likely to change as this feature is still in development.

It’s important to note that the Media Intelligence and Search panels are two distinct functions. Media Intelligence analyzes footage and implements AI-assisted metadata for easier categorization. The Search panel lets editors quickly locate specific elements within that footage using the metadata.

While many AI-powered tools in Adobe products process data in the cloud, Media Intelligence analyzes footage locally on your system in Premiere Pro. Adobe states that it does not access your footage or use it to train its models when using Media Intelligence, which is important for individuals who are conscious about the privacy and security of their assets.

However, suppose a user is unsure whether this feature suits their workflow or wants assurance that their footage is secure. In that case, they can turn it off by unchecking the option under “Visual Analysis” in Preferences.

Additionally, if a user decides to use this tool, Adobe provides three options for saving and storing cache from Media Intelligence analysis. The first option saves the cache as a sidecar file next to the media, allowing users to re-import into any project on any computer without reanalyzing. The second option stores the cache in the media cache folder, preventing reanalysis on the same system but requiring it on a different computer. Lastly, users can choose not to cache their analyzed media, requiring reanalysis on any computer.

Adobe also states that future tools and features in Premiere will be based on Media Intelligence. While its current design is for analyzing footage, the specific processes behind its function remain unclear. Fortunately, we can observe how Media Intelligence utilizes hardware to analyze footage.

How Does Media Intelligence Analysis Work?

Media Intelligence analysis utilizes your system’s hardware, such as the CPU and GPU, to decode and process footage. Depending on the codec the media is based on, different types of hardware components will impact the speed of analysis.

Highly compressed codecs like H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) are typically processed using specialized media engines, such as Intel’s Quick Sync and NVIDIA’s NVDEC, as long as the user’s hardware and Premiere Pro support the bit depth and chroma subsampling of your footage.

The screenshot below shows footage imported into Premiere using H.264 and H.265 codecs with an 8-bit depth and 4:2:0 chroma subsampling format to demonstrate how Media Intelligence utilizes hardware for processing. The Debug Monitor verifies that Premiere Pro utilizes hardware for decoding, which is consistent with Task Manager.

Next, we see how Media Intelligence processes footage without a hardware-decoding engine by importing RED RAW (.r3d) to evaluate its handling of RAW footage. Unfortunately, Premiere Pro lacks a specific tool to display how Media Intelligence processes these codecs, making performance assessment challenging. Instead, we again use Task Manager to identify the hardware components involved.

RAW footage processing is inherently complex due to the need for debayering, which the GPU typically accelerates. We see this in the screenshot above. Unlike compressed and intraframe codecs, RAW footage requires this additional step to reconstruct full-color images from sensor data.

In our exploration, Media Intelligence was much faster in processing R3D RAW footage compared to H.264 and H.265. However, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison as the footage imported had varying degrees of bit rates as well as different frame rates, which can affect how Premiere decodes and processes footage.

How Can You Optimize Your Systems for Media Intelligence?

Users looking to optimize their system for Media Intelligence should first determine where the analysis process fits within their workflow. Since the primary bottleneck for Media Intelligence is how fast your system can decode the footage, its performance depends on system capabilities. Certain hardware components, such as CPUs and GPUs, process different media types with varying efficiency, which impacts analysis speed. We recommend reaching out to one of our consultants to identify the necessary components needed to optimize how Premiere Pro decodes and processes footage in their system. By optimizing hardware for decoding and processing, users maximize the potential of Media Intelligence analysis and improve the processing and playback of footage in Premiere Pro.

Codec choice also plays a role, as different bit depths and chroma subsampling formats require varying levels of processing. Newer generations of hardware may perform faster when processing codecs, but users with older generations of hardware should explore newer generations from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to assess whether the performance gains justify an upgrade. Additional components such as memory and storage affect Premiere’s performance, and it’s worth visiting our hardware recommendation page to learn more about how Premiere Pro performs with different hardware configurations.

The good news is that since the decoding process, rather than the actual AI analysis, limits how fast Media Intelligence works, that means if your system is already optimized for the footage you work with, it will already be optimized for Media Intelligence. In general, we found that Media Intelligence In Beta version 25.2.0 could analyze multiple files within reasonable timing, aligning with Adobe’s claim that hours of footage can be processed in minutes. If you find that Media Intelligence is taking a long time to work, that might be a sign that it is time for a system upgrade or to take a closer look at the codecs you are currently working with to determine where the performance issues are stemming from.

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