Software Review: Adobe's CS4 - Powering The TV Studio Inside Your PC - Page 2

While an increasing number of new camcorders use hard drives as their recording platform, the second new input feature of CS4 turns many older camcorders into de facto hard-drive-based cameras. Adobe's On Location CS4 (based on a program developed a few years ago by Serious Magic, which Adobe acquired in 2006) allows a camcorder to be plugged into a PC via FireWire and then record directly to the computer's hard disk.

Unless you've got an assistant running very close behind you with a laptop, this probably isn't all that useful a feature for run-and-gun location shooting, but for quickly getting a video shot in the studio (even if your studio is a basement or garage) up to YouTube, it's tough to beat. It can also provide a better sense of how a shot will look on a computer monitor, as opposed to a camera's viewfinder.

Of course, once the footage is loaded into Premiere, it's time to edit it. As Stanley Kubrick once said, "If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit." And while all of the existing editing tools of Premiere are still here, they're joined by several new features and added flexibility.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing features of Premiere Pro CS4 — made even more so because we weren't able to experiment with it in the beta version we tested — was the ability search and transcribe speech recorded in a clip.

Premiere Pro CS4 finally allows for titles to be imported into Adobe After Effects for sophisticated animation. As far as rendering the completed output, compared with earlier versions, the rendering menu within Premiere Pro CS4 has been greatly expanded, with a greater emphasis on both high definition (including Blu-Ray) and Web-oriented outputs.

Photoshop And After Effects CS4

The CS4 version of Photoshop has been updated with several new features; perhaps the most intriguing of which is its new 3D shapes feature, which will morph any photo around a variety of 3D shapes, including squares, globes, pyramids — even wine bottles! Whether it's manipulating still photos or combining them with the digital effects possible in video programs such Premiere and After Effects, it seems safe to say that this feature will get quite a workout in years to come.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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