Premiere Pro CS4
by Bruce Bicknell
The folks at Adobe have been listening to the users and have incorporated a ton of new features into the new Premiere Pro CS4 application. When you open Premiere Pro CS4 for the first time there will be a different but familiar look to the interface. What I mean by this is that Adobe has given Premiere Pro CS4 a fresh look to the interface. The interface styles (colors, tab shapes, buttons) have changed along with the addition of some great new features that are integrated into the new version of Premiere Pro. Those new features are pretty impressive and the new tools are sure to save you valuable time (as well as some gray hair) and enhance your creative process. You can now exploit the full potential of tapeless workflows, efficiently manage and find assets by using metadata throughout production as well as utilizing more than 50 of the most requested editing enhancements to streamline your workflow and maximize your creative options. What are the top new features? They are:
Top new features
• Next-generation tapeless camera support
• Batch encoding
• Improved integration with other Adobe products
• Enhanced editing efficiency
• Direct-to-disk recording with cross-platform, redesigned Adobe OnLocation CS4
• Project intelligence with new XMP metadata support
• Speech Search makes dialogue in your video assets searchable
• Blu-ray Disc output
• Web-versions of your DVD and Blu-ray Disc projects made easy with Adobe Encore CS4
• Creative Pro Online Services
Let’s take a look at each one individually.
Tapeless Camera Support
Capturing video directly to disk have been talked about for awhile and the benefits of time-savings as well as the ability to keep the highest level of quality throughout a production have had us all salivating for some time. Well that wait is over as Premiere Pro CS4 is ready to allow you to get the most out of tapeless workflow. This alone will eliminate the time-consuming process of capturing our footage from tape saving us time and valuable resources.
Premiere Pro now has a wide range of video format support that includes DV to HD and more. There is also full support for a variety of tapeless cameras and media allowing you to go from capture to edit faster than ever before while retaining the high level of quality from your source material.
What cameras can you import from? The Panasonic P2 cameras in DVCPRO, DVC DVCPROHD, and AVC-Intra formats and across multiple P2 cards all allow you to import and natively edit content. In about the same way, you can import and edit content from Sony XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD cameras directly, without rewrapping or transcoding. Here is a cool feature, you can Access the footage you want before you import it by viewing camera metadata and organizing files in the Media Browser.
Locate and open footage easily with the new Media Browser panel, which lets you drag and drop files to the Project panel, preview them in the
Source Monitor, or add them to a sequence in the Timeline. Notice how P2 clips can be viewed as video clips or as a group of file folders (inset).
Batch encoding
We have all seen it. With the explosion of video sites like YouTube and others like it, the industry is realizing in huge numbers there has been in shift in how people view video entertainment. Whether you are doing podcasts or creating your own roughs, being able to output to a variety of formats is absolutely critical. This is where the Media Encoder comes in and saves you time by automating the process of creating multiple versions of your source files and Premiere Pro sequences. Media Encoder also encodes compositions from After Effects when it’s part of the Production Premium CS4 install. Use any combination of sequences and clips as sources, and encode to a wide variety of video formats, including FLV and F4V, Windows Media, MPEG-2, H.264, QuickTime, and more.
Use Adobe Media Encoder to batch encode a wide variety of video formats with any combination of sequences and clips as sources.
Improved Adobe integration
Sharing media between pre- and post-production software tools used to require you to render your work in one application before importing it into another, which was an inefficient and time-consuming process. If you needed to make changes, you had to make them in the original application and re-render the asset. Innovative Adobe Dynamic Link, previously available only in Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium, streamlines this process. Dynamic Link elimi¬nates the need for intermediate rendering by creating a direct link between new or existing assets in Premiere Pro CS4 and Encore CS4. Changes made in Premiere Pro such as color corrections and so on are immediately reflected in Encore.
With Dynamic Link, you can modify a sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro and see it update immediately in Encore with no need for rendering. In Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, the expanded Adobe Dynamic Link saves time on every project by dynamically linking content between After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, and Encore.
There are many other integration enhancements in Premiere Pro CS4 that include:
Flexible Photoshop layer options
Control exactly how Photoshop files look when imported into Premiere Pro. Preview all layers, choose which layers to import, and then choose how to import them—as individual layers, merged, or as a sequence.
Support for Photoshop files with video. Avoid the extra rendering step from Photoshop when importing PSD files that contain video. Simply import the files and use them just like any other video clip in the Timeline.
Support for Photoshop blending modes. Match your favorite looks from Photoshop by applying Photoshop blending modes to clips on the Premiere Pro Timeline. Blending modes are available for all clips, and are fully keyframeable. When importing Photoshop PSD files, blending modes are automatically carried over into Premiere Pro.
Enhanced editing efficiency
Work faster with powerful and flexible editing enhancements. Premiere Pro CS4 includes over 50 of the most requested editing enhancements that streamline your workflow. Display search results quickly. Apply effects to multiple selections, get timecode information faster, speed up work in the Timeline with new keyboard shortcuts, and much more.
Powerful management of projects, sequences, and clips
Find content quickly and efficiently by typing what you’re looking for into the Search box in the Effects, Project, or Metadata panel, and see results update instantly as you type. Manage projects more efficiently by saving file-location preferences on a per-project basis, making it easier to set up partitions for particular projects. Update assets in your project quickly as newer versions become available by replacing files in the Project panel; when replacing assets, all clip instances of that media update automatically. Combine content from multiple projects easily with the ability to import sequences from other projects. Choose any combination of sequences to import; Premiere Pro includes all nested sequences, helping to ensure that all content is imported successfully.
Create workspace configurations using Project-panel column configurations optimized for the task at hand. For example, set up different columns for logging and for editing.
Premiere Pro CS4 lets you delete individual preview files, making it easy to reclaim disk space. Keep the preview files you need, and discard the ones you don’t.
Quickly find what you’re looking for by typing its name into the Search box in the Project panel (shown here) or in the Effects or Metadata panel.
Superior editing control
Use Track Sync Lock controls to select which tracks remain in sync after ripple and insert edits. Display source content of clips, route channels to specific destination tracks in the Timeline, and toggle video or audio channels on or off as needed with source-content controls. Place clips exactly where you want them when dragging to the Timeline. Innovative ways to target audio and video tracks provide multiple methods to control clip placement, saving you time and preserving the placement of other clips in the Timeline. Drag and drop video- or audio-only portions of clips onto any combination of compatible destination tracks.
Timesaving editing enhancements
When you paste multiple clips into the Timeline, the playhead jumps to the end of the pasted clip so that subsequent clips are placed directly after, saving you time. Create new subclips quickly and easily by simply dragging content directly from the Timeline to the Project panel. Place keyframes precisely within the Effect Controls panel. As you move them, keyframes snap to sequence markers, the playhead, clip edges, or other video or audio keyframes. This makes it simple to align new keyframes with existing ones. Use vertical snapping to keep clips in sync when moving them between tracks. Easily apply the same transition to multiple items in your project by copying and pasting the transition. Premiere Pro CS4 applies all transition information, while maintaining destination attributes such as transition duration.
Use smart zoom features in the Timeline to switch quickly between detailed and global views of your content. Simply press a key to zoom the Timeline to show the entire contents of your sequence, and then press another to return to the previous zoom level.
Quickly clear all effects from one or multiple selected clips using a single command.
Audio control
Finding specific sonic events in your audio tracks—for example, the start of a sentence, a car door slamming, or the downbeat in your soundtrack—is often a simple matter of looking for peaks and valleys in their waveforms. New features in Premiere Pro CS4 let you view audio waveforms in more detail in the Source Monitor. Zoom both channels independently or together. Navigate with precision within the Source Monitor when working with audio-only clips. Use the playhead to scrub the waveform directly. Change batch capture behavior easily by setting and adjusting audio-channel mapping for offline clips at any time, when or after they are created. You can also recapture offline clips as audio-only or video-only by changing recapture settings for offline clips, without having to recapture them first.
Zoom in on audio waveforms in different channels together or, as shown here, independently in the Source Monitor. Premiere Pro CS4 gives you the flexibility to navigate your content quickly and efficiently.
Enhanced keyboard-driven workflow
Point-and-click, mouse-based operation is a simple and easy way to learn new software. But experienced users want to navigate and control their tools as quickly and efficiently as possible. Premiere Pro CS4 offers complete, mouseless operation via customizable keyboard shortcuts, to help you focus on being creative. Use keyboard shortcuts to browse through clips loaded in the Source Monitor tab and to save time when moving to the start and end of clips in the Effect Controls panel. Jump to the start and end of clips in the Timeline using dedicated shortcuts that make clip navigation easy. You can assign shortcuts to mark clips more quickly and to cycle forward and backward through all the panels in the Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 user interface.
Project intelligence with new XMP metadata support
Metadata is the unsung hero of an efficient workflow, and the key to the perennial challenge of making video searchable. You have great footage, but do you know where it was shot, who the talent is, and if you have the rights to use it? And more important, can you—and your viewers—find the video content that’s most relevant? Premiere Pro CS4, OnLocation CS4, and Encore CS4 deliver innovative, industry-leading solutions that solve both problems.
Careful planning keeps your productions on schedule and on budget. During preproduc¬tion, block your scenes, plan camera moves, and create a shot list to plot your shooting sequence and fill in metadata associated with each shot. Bring your careful planning on-set by creating a shot list in Adobe OnLocation. While you’re recording footage directly to disk, OnLocation automatically captures important metadata-based project intelligence associated with each shot coming from the camera. Create new takes each time you re-record, with each take inheriting metadata from the master shot. You can even edit or add to the metadata while you’re at the shoot.
During post-production, you can use metadata to streamline project tracking, asset auditing, and many other formerly tedious manual tasks in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Encore CS4, as well as in Adobe Soundbooth CS4, After Effects CS4, and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional software. Best of all, as other workgroup members modify files and assets, metadata-based project intelligence associated with each media asset can be edited and updated in real time during the normal course of production.
Save even more time by eliminating the need to hunt from folder to folder to track down assets. Metadata makes your assets searchable within the Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Timeline, so you can locate assets and clips by filename, date, time, camera setting such as resolution or frame rate, shot location, or any other search term you’ve added to your asset or clip.
Speech Search makes dialogue in your video assets searchable
This has to be one of the coolest new features in Premiere Pro! You can now use the new Speech Search technology in Premiere Pro to turn your spoken dialogue into text-based metadata that makes you video searchable. Here is how it works. This new feature automatically turns any spoken word into a keyword that points to the exact point in a clip where that word is spoken. This is great news for post production pros and all of us who watch video online. Speech Search will greatly benefit the editing process as creative pros will be able to locate the relevant points in a particular clip based on what gets said within the clip. Another important note is that , the time-accurate text that corresponds to spoken words is embedded in the output you render from Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, so your video is searchable by other tools that can read XMP metadata, such as search and indexing engines.
In Premiere Pro, Speech Search can significantly speed the time-consuming process of wading through large quantities of footage to find the relevant clips. For example, you can quickly find all of the clips in a project that contain a particular word, or the opening lines of a scene from the script you’re shooting, by searching from the Project panel. Once you’ve narrowed your search, you can search within a particular clip for a word or phrase by using the Source Monitor, or you can skim the preliminary transcript that appears in the Metadata panel. Both approaches are significantly faster than manually scrubbing through a clip to find, for example, the spot in a long interview where the subject talks about a transformative trip to Zambia. Additionally, you can tab from word to word in the Metadata panel to make edits while ensuring that text remains synchronized to the spoken word.
Well that gives you a good overview of the dynamic new features in Premiere Pro CS4. I for one am impressed with the new features and definitely will be upgrading to take advantage of what CS4 can do for my productivity and creativity.
Bruce Bicknell is a video and animation specialist who is the founder of Digital Blue Productions. He has been an instructor on Adobes in-box training as well as published in Photoshop User, Layers Magazine, ATI Red, MacTribe and PhotoshopCAFE. His clients include Time Inc., DTCC, KW Media and has worked with magazines that include People, National Geographic, Adventure, Photoshop User, and Layers magazines to name a few. Bruce is also an instructor at Sessions.edu teaching video and graphics courses.
