Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 review

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 has made improvements throughout the process of video production, starting with video acquisition.

The included OnLocation application provides a dedicated environment for recording DV, HDV and DVCPRO footage direct to disk from any FireWire-equipped camera. Its interface has been given a major CS4 overhaul and now provides access to the field monitor, waveform and vectorscope from a single screen. The handling of metadata has also been improved, making it simpler to manage multiple takes, add comments and flag up footage.

Such tapeless workflows are made even more efficient by native support for AVCHD, Panasonic P2, Sony HDCAM and HDV cameras. A new Media Browser panel also makes importing footage easier, as you can view assets on internal and external hard disks.

Editing within Premiere Pro CS4 has also improved. Assembling sequences is faster and more flexible thanks to multiple track targeting and track sync controls. You can quickly apply transitions and effects to multiple clips, copy and paste transitions and save multiple effects as re-usable presets.

The new Transcribe to Text command converts dialogue into time-coded speech metadata. Using the Metadata panel you can then navigate your footage quickly by jumping to a particular word. The quality of the transcription depends on factors such as ambient noise, the number of speakers and accent. In fact, for most casually captured footage the system is practically useless. However, for simple talking head projects, transcription can work reasonably well, and you can easily clean up the text in the Metadata panel. The real strength of speech search is that the transcript can be saved as XMP metadata, which makes it available to Adobe's own Media Player and to search engines. Making web video text-searchable could prove a must-have feature.

Premiere Pro CS4 benefits from tighter integration with Adobe's other Creative Suite applications, in particular when importing Photoshop's PSD format files. You now have advanced control over layers and full support for blend modes - ideal for special effects - and embedded video layers. You can cut and paste text from other CS4 applications to Premiere Pro CS4's Titler, retaining the font and style.

The benefits of integration are even more apparent when it comes to output. Premiere Pro CS4 includes both Adobe Media Encoder and Adobe Device Central CS4. This means you can output to multiple screen sizes at once and use onscreen device emulators to see how they will look. Premiere Pro CS4 also includes Encore CS4, a standalone authoring application that lets you create menu-based wrappers for your video, complete with pop-up panels. You can then burn them to DVD or Blu-ray discs, or output them to Flash-based Shockwave files for online delivery.

There's no doubt that Premiere Pro CS4 and its supporting applications provide a highly integrated and feature-packed production environment - and that's even more true of the Production Premium suite, which includes After Effects and Soundbooth as well as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. This multiple-application workflow-based approach is essential for full-time professional teams, but it's overkill for the rest of us. Even serious standalone film-makers can save themselves a lot of time and money by using Premiere Elements or Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum instead.

Author: Tom Arah