Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 review

Having the script to use as a reference significantly improves recognition, as it cuts down the range of possible utterances from onscreen actors enormously, essentially matching verbal elements to existing text. So if you’re searching for a particular phrase, you’ll be much more likely to find it using the facilities within Premiere Pro. The CS Review service, which facilitates collaborative work, will also be useful, but this isn’t initially available at the time of shipping.

The Media Encoder has a few tweaks as well. Information is now displayed about the source footage as well as the output settings. The Automatic option matches TV Standard, Frame Rate, Field Order and Pixel Aspect ratio for H.264 and MPEG2 Blu-ray and DVD output formats, so these will be kept the same as the source footage. You can set the bit rate based on dimensions, so larger frames use more data automatically. The Interpret Footage command found in Premiere Pro has been passed across, too. So you can, for example, force PAL footage to run at a film frame rate, or vice versa, and avoid quality-reducing interpolation or drop-frame encoding.

XMP points can be added to Flash FLV and F4V output. If you’re outputting multiple timelines and assets from one project, you can use the new Queue button in the Media Export dialogue to line them up in the batch list without beginning background rendering. But if you just want to grab a quick frame from your video, at long last the windows bitmap exporter returns. An icon in the Source and Program preview windows calls single-frame output directly, without the necessity of loading the entire Media Encoder.

A minor, but rather useful enhancement is the new set of commands for finding and removing gaps in the timeline, which are worth running on any project that’s nearing completion. Premiere Pro CS5 has a few other little enhancements. The Find Faces command looks for clips that have human visages within them, which would be useful for locating files with interviews buried among numerous background shots, but we found it somewhat quirky in operation.

Conclusion

Premiere Pro CS5 is a huge leap forward for Adobe, and answers questions that some of us have been asking for as much as a decade. We may have been waiting for the move to 64-bit for rather too long, but at least Adobe appears to have made the switch worthwhile. Premiere Pro CS4 was already one of the more fluid editors, but CS5 takes this to an unprecedented new level. The smooth scrubbing and real-time rendering capabilities are just what existing users have been looking for, and could be enough to convince long-term fans of other big-name alternatives to switch over.