Review: Adobe CS4 Production Premium
Premiere Pro CS4 took about 10 minutes to index the 12- gigabyte MPEG-2 Transport (M2T) stream of multiplexed audio and video that OnLocation had created. It would be nice to see other format recording options in OnLocation, akin to the way that Focus Enhancements FireStore Direct To Edit technology handles hard-disk recording, but this would make even more processing power necessary.
Figure 2. Premiere Pro CS4 has a GUI that is more efficient and attractive than its predecessor.
After the footage was indexed, it was apparent that the pixel aspect ratio was incorrect when we opened the clip in the viewer. However, by simply reinterpreting the footage to the HDV standard of 1.333 widescreen, the video appeared correctly, saving us the time of reimporting content.
We weren’t able to open any of our old Premiere Pro CS3 projects because of the prerelease nature of the software, so we weren’t able to check out some of the complex edits we’d done with CS3. The release version fixed this issue. We did notice that Adobe has added a few features to Premiere that make it a little more efficient and attractive.
In the same window where you’ll find History and Effects, there is now a Media Browser option. This window provides a way to search any hard drive connected to your computer, finding any media that Premiere Pro can import. This is a timesaver, as you don’t need to keep clicking File > Import for every file needed for a project. Another new tab you can add to your workspace is called Resource Central—another part of the CS4 suite that blurs the line between offline and online usage. Within the Resource Central pane, you can access tutorials, sample files, and extensions for Premiere Pro and other video products that Adobe offers.
What used to be called the User Interface preference in CS3 is now called Appearance. In addition, it appears that the adjustable brightness introduced in CS3 was a big hit because Adobe tweaked the slider to enable users to make the interface even darker or lighter than before. You’ll also find better control over where your cache files are stored. Also metadata has a greater use and benefit in most of CS4.
Soundbooth 2 shows some significant improvements over the first version, which was introduced in CS3. A feature sorely lacking in the original Soundbooth was multitrack audio production, and the new Soundbooth’s multitrack interface aims to please. The interface is simple and not at all intimidating, as it uses dashboardlike controls that pop up when the mouse hovers over a track. One click on a track will quickly switch from the multitrack production interface to the file editing screen. After making editing changes, it’s another single click right back to your multitrack layout. For our testing, we used Soundbooth only to make some minor improvements to our sound quality and to get a transcription of the narrative, so we’ll expand our assessment in a future article. After reducing our hour of footage down to a 3-minute test clip in Premiere Pro, we added fades in and out, adjusted the color, and exported the timeline to Adobe Media Encoder CS4.
Encoding With Adobe Media Encoder
Adobe Media Encoder is a stand-alone product that works in harmony with After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other Adobe tools, but it can also be used on its own, similar to the way that Apple Compressor works either with Final Cut or on its own. Put any audio or video media in the Adobe Media Encoder queue, choose your compression settings, and let it go to work. You can also choose a specific timeline within a Premiere Pro project to compress without opening Premiere, which is a timesaver for those who just need to get the compressed file out the door as quickly as possible. Adobe Media Encoder also supports watch folders that will automatically begin a preset encoding session as soon as a file is placed inside.
Figure 3. Adobe Media Encoder CS4 works with Premiere Pro or as a stand-alone encoder.
Having chosen H.264 Blu-ray and Dolby digital audio for our compression, we let Media Encoder load our timeline into its queue. Two hours later, our 3-minute test compression was done. In place of FLV and F4V files, which were having a few issues in our prerelease version, we exported a QuickTime streaming file at the full 1440x1080 size, which turned out to be excellent quality.
Adobe Media Encoder can also upload a completed compression to a user-identified server, a significant step in workflow enhancement. However, as Tim mentioned in an article on StreamingMedia.com, automated FTP transmissions are only available on Adobe’s more expensive Flash Media Encoder Server. There is also the option to have Media Encoder delete the original file after verifying a successful upload to a remote location.
Transcription With Premiere Pro and Soundbooth
Adobe has added an autotranscription feature to Premiere Pro and Soundbooth. In theory, you can take a video or audio clip and run it through the analyzer, which will spit out a speech-to-text metadata file that times each word to a synchronous frame of video. There are several tools that do this and do it quite well, but they range from a low-end price tag of about $18,000 to more than $100,000. Adobe licensed a set of speech-to-text libraries that are acceptable for the price range, even though they seem to lag behind other speech indexing, search, and retrieval systems we’ve used.