Adobe Premiere Pro, Encore & OnLocation CS4
James Morris
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Jan 29, 2009 1:56 PM
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Adobe | http://www.adobe.com.au
RRP: $1195 (time of review)
Performance: 
Features & Design: 
Value for money:
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User Rating: No user ratings.
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Support for latest video formats and a batch-media encoder, but supporting apps have seen little upgrading.
Premiere has the lengthiest history of any PC video-editing package still in production. Dating back to the early days of Windows, it wrote the book on how this kind of software should look and feel on a PC.
But being first doesn’t automatically mean you stay ahead of the pack, and Premiere Pro has increasingly found itself under pressure from above and below. In particular, Final Cut Studio 2 has won a significant following in recent times.
And despite the fact that Premiere Pro CS4 doesn’t have CS3’s return to the Mac as a headline grabber, it does have some important new capabilities that help it stay ahead.
The interface itself offers purely cosmetic changes. But the New Project window has seen a significant redesign. There’s a screen where you can set the capture format and other project settings, as well as the base-editing format.
The biggest news here, though, as with Adobe’s consumer-oriented Premiere Elements 7, is that at long last Premiere Pro supports AVCHD natively, so you don’t need to add a third-party plug-in such as CineForm’s Aspect HD.
Presets are included covering the majority of likely AVCHD formats, including anamorphic (1440 x 1080) and non-anamorphic (1920 x 1080) versions for all the standard frame rates – 24p and 25p, plus 50i and 60i.
While this was a heinous omission in consumer software, considering the prevalence of AVCHD camcorders, it’s arrived just in the nick of time for the high-end Premiere Pro.
Panasonic has only recently launched the AG-HMC152EN, placing AVCHD firmly on the map as a professional format, and consumer models are starting to become credible semi-professional options, too.
Adobe’s AVCHD implementation was also well worth waiting for. It’s extremely fluid. We tried it with AVCHD files from most camcorder models currently available, and it didn’t miss a beat.
The AVCHD format isn’t the only tapeless option, though. Premiere Pro CS4 will also support footage natively from all the latest professional camcorders, including RED One, P2 cards (DVCPRO, DVCPROHD and AVCHD), and XDCAM (both EX and HD), all of which also previously required the CineForm Aspect HD plug-in.
Premiere Pro now also handles most tapeless video formats, from consumer all the way up to 4K professional. JVC’s MPEG2-based TOD and MOD files didn’t appear to be included, however.
Time-savers
One source of annoyance for independent producers using Premiere Pro has been the necessity of loading up each project manually for encoding. If you’re pumping out many videos a day then you either need to leave your system tied up encoding each one once it’s been completed, or wake it up at regular intervals overnight to set the next one going.
Adobe promises an alternative at long last with the new standalone Media Encoder CS4. This is a development of a tool that was previously integrated into Premiere Pro, but now you can load it separately, too.
The standalone Media Encoder provides a simple batch list where you can load video files, choose a target format and preset, and then leave them all to output in succession while you get on with something else.
But the real labour saver is the ability to load Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 projects alongside the video files, so you can leave projects encoding overnight.
Alternatively, if you need to output multiple formats from the same project, the Media Encoder lets you line these up as a batch, too.
Support is comprehensive, and now includes output to P2 media such as DVCPROHD, image sequences, various audio formats including AIFF and MP3, and Clip Notes using QuickTime and Windows Media.
Ingeniously, Premiere Pro CS4 has also integrated the ability to transcribe dialogue to text automatically, so you can use this as searchable metadata to aid finding specific parts of a script in a complicated project.
You can also click on individual words in a transcript, which the current time marker will then show in the Source window.
This is a feature that sneaked into Avid Media Composer a few minor releases ago, and is now fully integrated with version 3.
It has garnered quite a positive reaction, so it’s no surprise seeing similar abilities arrive in Premiere Pro. Our review copy came with only the US English dialect recognition files, however, and didn’t do very well transcribing our test files, although you can edit the text manually.
But its recognition abilities should improve with the right pronunciation libraries, which will ship with Australian English-capable copies.
The Metadata panel within which this transcribed text appears is a new addition. This reads all manner of information about the chosen file, such as EXIF schema.
The Find box in the Project and Effects panels also extends to the Metadata panel, so when you type in a word from a script, for example, it should be highlighted in the Speech Transcript. Unfortunately, the search facility doesn’t extend to phrases.
Premiere Pro CS4 includes a selection of lesser, but still useful productivity enhancements. The Media Browser brings hunting for clips within the app itself, which makes importing from hard drive, disc and Flash memory easier.
Another useful tweak is the ability to apply effects to multiple clips at once.
Timeline scrubbing and previewing are more responsive, too. Adobe has added a new Yellow playback category.
Clips that need rendering are still given a red timeline marker, and clips that don’t are still green. Yellow clips are in between – they don’t match the project settings, but don’t need rendering to play back in real time. This saves time and hard disk space.
- continued next page - 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.