Desktop Post: Part 2 - Adobe Premiere CS5.5

Post by Daniel Restuccio

Premiere Pro in Adobe CS 5 was a watershed release. The program was written from the ground up in 64-bit environment that is fully exploited on the Mac OS X and the very stable Windows 7 system. The kind of hiccups running Premiere in a 32-bit funky Windows XP operating system are mostly banished. Refinements to this aspect of the engine in CS5.5 is that the 64-bit addressing of using the CPU cores has been further optimized improving overall stability when editing projects with large files, i.e. Red One or Red Epic projects.

Adobe, with this 5.5 release seems recommitted to their flagship editing software. With Premiere 5.5 projects can be truly cross platform and the benefits of Dynamic Linking across other Adobe apps continues to enhance Premiere's profile as a serious NLE. Demand for Adobe's Production Premium CS5.5 has grown 22 percent year-over-year with 45 percent growth on the Mac. The recent announcements at IBC that Adobe Production Premium 5.5 will be used extensively at the UK broadcast network ITV and the acquisition of IRIDAS lends serious credibility to the notion that Adobe means business and that everyone should consider giving Premiere another look.

The Premiere Pro 5.5 upgrade sports a number of fresh features. It has an improved Mercury Playback engine; better DLSR editing, specifically the merge clip feature connects video clips to sound clips when shooting using a double system acquisition; customizable keyboard shortcuts so you can make your keyboard emulate Avid Media Composer or Final Cut Pro 7; an enhanced insert and overwrite editing features; and a new importer allows you to natively work with Red Epic footage. There are more GPU-accelerated features, including time remapping, speed change, footage interpretation options, field order processing, filmic transitions, blur effects and more. The existing support for Red R3D is enhanced and now Epic footage can be imported. What is significantly missing is native support for Arri Alexa footage.

What is called the Mercury Playback Engine is a collection of features that includes 64-bit addressing, enabled multithreading and the ability to access CUDA technology on specific Nvidia cards. This is specialized functionality built into Premiere Pro 5.0 that has been enhanced in PP 5.5 enabling it to do a lot more. As a 64-bit app, Premiere allows for all the RAM in a system to be addressable. This, coupled with the reasonably stable 64-bit Windows 7 operating system, makes for a mostly reliable editing environment.

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