Encore CS4

Although there’s a CS4 release of Encore, with every new version it feels like more of an adjunct to Premiere Pro, which isn’t such a bad thing considering how well the integrated disc authoring in Avid Liquid works.

Encore is still a separate app in CS4, but the ability to render Premiere Pro projects without having the full application open has paid dividends.

You can now import Premiere Pro sequences directly into Encore CS4 and add them to the timeline, cutting out the intermediate rendering stage.

This works particularly well alongside the ability to author once and then output to Blu-ray, DVD and Flash from the same project.

You can start with a high-definition project, then render to the three different formats without quality loss. Repurposing for the web will still be necessary, in particular to add online interactivity, but the workflow has been considerably streamlined.

As with the previous ability to add chapter markers in Premiere Pro, which are then carried forward in the export to Encore, chapter markers and Flash cues are recognised when a project is imported.

After Effects projects can also be imported for use as motion menu assets, and the Dynamic Link capability means they can be edited live, with changes showing up immediately.

Other than this, however, Encore CS4’s new features are relatively minor. You can now export subtitles as a TXT file for editing, as well as importing TXT, images and FAB images to add subtitles.

Pop-up menus can be added to Blu-ray projects, but there are no advanced Blu-ray interactivity authoring capabilities beyond this, such as BD-Live.

OnLocation CS4

The other application bundled with Premiere Pro is OnLocation CS4. It’s the software introduced with CS3 that turns a laptop into a hard-disk recorder on steroids.

As well as capturing footage live to a format that’s immediately editable in Premiere Pro, it provides a much larger preview than a camcorder’s LCD, plus live waveform, vectorscope and audio spectrum readouts. This works over FireWire, supporting DV, HDV and DVCPRO.

Stronger together

Premiere Pro CS4 still has the odd niggle. We could do with more elaborate title animation options than just rolls and crawls. Sure, you can do virtually anything you like with text in After Effects, but it’s very time-consuming to be forced to do so – and expensive, if that’s all you use this heavyweight compositing tool for.

Adobe also seems to be deliberately pushing customers towards Production Premium by not offering a bundle including just Soundbooth and Premiere Pro. The $2200 price difference between the two is quite a leap, although you can buy Soundbooth on its own for $299.

Premiere Pro faces a continuing challenge in winning over the high-end of video professionals. But as a tool for video producers crossing over between web and more traditional methods of distribution, it has a strong case. The batch-encoding tool will be a particularly powerful weapon.

And this is where its greatest strength lies: in its role as part of a suite of interoperating programs. While Premiere Pro CS4 is a great video-editing tool, having tools such as Encore and OnLocation to back it up, plus Soundbooth and After Effects in Production Premium, is what makes it a particularly persuasive package.