Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5

When Premiere Pro CS 5.0 came out I really didn’t think nonlinear editing tools could get any better. The new Mercury engine in Premiere Pro was amazing. The ability to edit multiple formats in the same timeline without any decrease in performance just blew me away.

We all know time is money. As budgets get smaller and the projects get bigger the post production specialist needs efficient tools that work smart and fast. So what could Adobe do with their new version to make me like it even more? An editing tool made for the DSLR filmmaker.

Having used the Canon 7D for numerous projects now, I’ve grown to know its limitations: audio. For such an amazing camera that gets beautiful images with shallow depth of field, its audio is completely crap. No worries though as we have been using the Zoom H4N to capture audio separately. As long as you use the clapper and timecode you’re in great shape.

WHAT’S NEW

Premiere Pro CS 5.5 has a new feature called Merge Clips, which allows for dual system sound support. Once you synchronize your video and audio tracks you can have up to 16 audio tracks synced with a single video track. Simply place all your synced audio with a video track on the timeline, right click, choose merge clips and this will create a new clip called “name of clip” merged. This new clip will contain all the audio files in it. You can double click it to open in the source monitor, drop it into the sequence, or anything else you like since it reacts as a normal clip. read more...