Premiere Pro CS4

Adobe has announced the new CS4 suite and there's an update to Premiere Pro coming. It's $799 standalone or $1,699 as part of the Production Premium Suite, which adds After Effects and Soundbooth (oh great, more ways to spend money.)

I have a bit of a soft-spot for Premiere as I started using it way back at version 1 (that's the original version 1) and even wrote a review of it way back then. But then came Final Cut - which was another leap forward for desktop computer video editing with it's UI borrowed heavily from Avid - and then Adobe abandoned the Mac platform when they came out with Premiere Pro, so I haven't been using Premiere much lately.

But they came back to the Mac with CS3 in 2007, and here's an update.

MacWorld has a preview article (they call it a first look, but I'd call it a glance) and there's some interesting features:

  • OnLocation for capturing, and logging video in the field.
  • Adobe Media Encoder for batch encoding Premiere Pro sequences and other files to multiple formats.
  • Expanded tapeless media support: P2, AVCHD, XDCAM EX, and XDCAM HD. it supports the metadata (shot information encoded in the files.
  • Speech transcription: analyzes a clip’s audio and creates a text transcript that’s timecode-specific and searchable by keyword.

At the moment I have no plans to go back to Premiere; I'm happy with Final Cut Pro even though I have some workflow problems I need to resolve. But it's good to know Premiere's back on the Mac and (hopefully) giving Apple some competition.

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