Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 review

Unsurprisingly, Adobe has also improved how Premiere Pro handles video shot on DSLRs, as these are becoming increasingly popular among videographers. Files from the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and 7D, as well as from Nikon’s D90, D300 and D3000, can all now be imported. Red R3D files were already supported in CS4, but performance has been improved with CS5. Should you still be using HDV, Premiere Pro will now detect scenes during capture, as it has been able to with DV for some years. At long last, you can import assets from DVD as well (assuming they’re not encrypted).

Adobe is also hoping its new engine will win editors over from the competition. To make the transition easier, you can now import from and export to Avid and Final Cut, using AAF and XMP respectively. This is being touted as a route to more streamlined Flash, After Effects and Encore integration. But we suspect Adobe is hoping you’ll be wooed by Premiere Pro in the process.

Long-time users of Premiere Pro have been mourning the demise of the Ultra virtual set software that Adobe acquired and then ceased developing after CS3. Now the core engine of that app has been built into Premiere Pro in the form of the Ultra keyer. Although this still doesn’t include the virtual set repertoire, it does carry forward the powerful keying capabilities, which are much more able to handle unevenly lit and wrinkled backgrounds than the basic key included in Premiere Pro since its introduction. We found the Ultra keyer could easily produce clean keys, and even played these back in real time when the underlying footage was in Red R3D format.

Online services

Another important part of Premiere Pro CS5 doesn’t come from the app itself, but via Adobe’s CS Live online services. These include CS Review, BrowserLab, Acrobat.com, and SiteCatalyst NetAverages. But the most significant for video production is Adobe Story, which is designed to work alongside or even replace traditional screenwriting tools such as Final Draft and Movie Magic.

The app itself is free to Adobe users, and runs on Adobe AIR like an increasing number of online-oriented apps. You can either import your script from another app, or create it from scratch in Adobe Story. The resulting text will then be given industry-standard tags, after which the Adobe Story text can then be imported into OnLocation.

The script also helps when using Premiere Pro CS5’s voice recognition tools. These were added in CS4, but although potentially useful their ability to pick up dialogue accurately could be patchy. When an Adobe Story script is associated with clips via OnLocation, matching dialogue for each scene is included as metadata with the media files.