Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 / FAQ

What's new in Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5.5?

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 lets you edit faster than ever by offering industry-leading, cross-platform, native file–based workflows and GPU-accelerated filters and effects with the enhanced Adobe Mercury Playback Engine — now on workstations and laptops. Maintain full frame rate at full resolution when applying multiple color corrections and effects across many video layers and when working on complex timelines and long-form projects with thousands of clips — whether a project is in SD, HD, 2K, or 4K. Open large projects up to ten times faster and mix and match AVCHD, P2, XDCAM, RED, ProHD, Canon XF, and DSLR camera formats freely in the timeline without rendering. Get to work instantly with native support for the latest tapeless and DSLR camera formats — RED R3D, XDCAM 50, AVCCAM, P2, AVCHD, AVC-Intra, Canon XF, and JVC ProHD — without transcoding or rewrapping.

Accelerate production cycles by using Adobe Story scripts to create metadata-rich assets. Speed up your editing workflow by directly importing Adobe Story scripts, complete with metadata, into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. Eliminate hours of routine work using Speech Analysis and other metadata to quickly find footage. In addition, quickly find content using innovative metadata features like face detection. Closed-captioning support lets you play back and display 608 and 708 closed captions that are synced to your video sequence and viewable in the Program monitor.

Get an expanded audio-for-video editing workflow thanks to integration with Adobe Audition® CS5.5 software. Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 delivers a highly efficient editing workflow that dramatically boosts your productivity with the enhanced ability to import and export Final Cut Pro and Avid projects; new, intuitive Adobe Media Encoder presets that are optimized for outputting clips and sequences to Adobe CS Review, a CS Live online service that streamlines the review process; and dozens of other user-requested editing enhancements.

Do I need a specific graphics card to get faster performance when using the GPU-accelerated features?

The Mercury Playback Engine brings performance gains to all the GPUs supported in Adobe Creative Suite® 5.5 software, but the best performance comes with specific NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs, including new GPU acceleration on mobile workstations. If you're upgrading your system today and want to get the most out of your configuration, the following graphics cards offer significant additional acceleration by the Mercury Playback Engine:

• GeForce GTX 285 (Windows® and Mac OS)
• GeForce GTX 470 (Windows)
• Quadro CX (Windows)
• Quadro FX 3700M
• Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
• Quadro FX 3800M
• Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
• Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
• Quadro 2000
• Quadro 4000 (Windows)
• Quadro 5000 (Windows)
• Quadro 5000M (mobile, Windows)
• Quadro 6000
  
  

With these cards, you will see results instantly when color correcting, keying with the new Ultra® keyer, applying Gaussian blurs and blend modes, and working with many other effects.

GPU acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards makes the creative process more fluid and accelerates rendering for faster output. Adobe continuously evaluates support of new cards.

How can I find out if my Mac is compatible with one of the new NVIDIA GPUs?

Refer to the NVIDIA website for the system requirements for each GPU, and check your system and software (click the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your Mac Pro screen and choose About This Mac).

For example, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac requires MacPro 3,1 or MacPro 4,1 (2008 or 2009) or later. MacPro 1,1 and MacPro 2,1 are not compatible.

To find out if you are running the correct Mac Pro model, go to About This Mac to see which system you are running:

• Choose About This Mac from the Apple menu.
• Click the More Info button.
• Select Hardware.

The model identifier should be MacPro 3,1 or MacPro 4,1 (2008 or 2009) or later.

Make sure that your Mac Pro software version is 10.5.7 or later before you install the Quadro FX 4800 graphics board. You will also need to install a driver package to run Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. The driver package is included in the CD that ships with your product. Both the Mac OS X software version upgrade and the Mac driver upgrade need to be complete before installing hardware.

The GeForce GTX 285 for Mac requires Mac OS X v10.5.7 or later. If your version of the Mac OS is not Mac OS X v10.5.7, you need to upgrade. Your system must be running Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) in order to upgrade to v10.5.7. Once your system software version is at 10.5.7, install the GeForce GTX 285 for Mac drivers by running the installation utility on the CD that is included with your GeForce GTX 285 for Mac product.

Do you have any recommendations for hardware that will make Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 run even better?

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 has a scalable architecture, so performance scales with the speed of your system. The minimum system requirements for your workflow depend on the type of content with which you plan to work. See the system requirements for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. With native 64-bit support, Adobe Premiere Pro can take advantage of all the available RAM on your system. For multicore systems, Adobe recommends 4GB or more of RAM per core. On any system, many users will see a great performance gain in their workflows as they add more RAM, with 16GB of RAM being a good baseline if you plan to run multiple applications simultaneously.

Will Adobe OnLocation™ still be a separate install in Creative Suite 5.5 with the purchase of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5?

No. Adobe OnLocation CS5.5 software is part of the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 installer. The End-User License Agreement (EULA) allows installation of Adobe Premiere Pro (including Adobe OnLocation) for nonconcurrent use, so it is possible to install Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe OnLocation on two separate systems provided they are not used concurrently.

Can I buy Adobe Encore® CS5 or Adobe OnLocation CS5.5 separately?

No. Adobe Encore CS5 and Adobe OnLocation CS5.5 software are sold only with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. However, customers who have earlier versions of Adobe Encore DVD (1.x or 2.0) may upgrade to the full Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 product for the standard upgrade price.

Does Adobe Premiere Pro support the hardware, camera, and other software I use?

Adobe Premiere Pro supports a broad range of hardware and software for Mac OS and Windows, so you can choose from a range of workstations and capture cards to build the editing system that meets your needs and budget. Enhance your system with additional plug-ins, including many from Adobe After Effects® software. Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 works with a variety of third-party hardware, from DV camcorders and decks to HD and SD hardware. Check third-party hardware compatibility for the most current listing of supported hardware.

With comprehensive video format compatibility, you can work with the formats you want, including natively editing files from the latest tapeless formats, such as RED, P2, XDCAM EX and HD, and AVC-Intra and AVCHD, as well as Canon XF and JVC ProHD without transcoding or rewrapping. Edit all standard- or high-definition formats, from DV and HDV to HD and beyond (some formats may require additional hardware).

Where can I get a trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5?

To get a trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, visit the trial download page.

The trial period begins on the first day that you launch the software and continues for 30 days (a counter appears each time you launch to help you track the elapsed time). When the trial expires, you must purchase the software to continue using it.

Encore CS5 is not available as a trial. It will be installed as part of the trial DVD set for Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium and Master Collection but will not be available for use until you purchase.

The trial versions of Adobe After Effects CS5.5, Flash® Professional CS5.5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, and Adobe Audition CS5.5 software do not include some features that depend on software licensed from parties other than Adobe. For example, some codecs for encoding MPEG formats are available only with the full version of these products. RED R3D, AVC-Intra, HDV, XDCAM, and AVCHD formats and sequence presets are not supported in the trial for both Mac OS and Windows. Adobe Media Encoder export does not include MPEG-4, MPEG-2, MPEG-2 DVD, or MPEG-2 Blu-ray as export formats in the trial. The file importer does not recognize file types that are not included in trial mode (such as MPEG and XDCAM files). HDV is not included as a capture format in the Mac OS version of the trial.