Software Review: Adobe Master Collection – Premiere Pro CS4 from Adobe Systems

This is the third of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS4 this fall, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS4? On a PC you need a 2GHz or faster processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista; on Mac, PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 – 10.5.4 (Leopard), 512MB RAM, 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card, 10GB hard drive space for installation and DVD-ROM Drive.

Adobe Premiere Pro is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software application. It has gained acceptance within the film and video industry and has been used in part in such films as Dust to Glory by Dana Brown and Superman Returns for the video capture process and so, as the name implies, it is a professional-level editing package.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 attempts to reduce the complex process that is video production. It does this by including copies of the products Adobe OnLocation CS4 and Adobe Encore CS4 to try to make each step of the video production more efficient and giving you more time to work your story.

So what is new with Premiere Pro CS4?

• End-to-End metadata workflow – will let you add metadata to clips both on set with Adobe OnLocation, and while editing via Premiere. This will give your workflow greater project intelligence as you can use the new speech recognition technology to create text-based metadata that you can use to organize your assets.

• Speech Search – this technology offers you the ability to turn the spoken dialog in your clips into text-based metadata which will make your video searchable. No more hand entering key words. Now through voice analysis, keywords can be automatically added, allowing you jump directly to the frame that you are after.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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