Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Studio Monthly by Charlie White

PRACTICAL IMPROVEMENTS AND SOME PLEASANT SURPRISESJust when we thought Premiere Pro for Mac or Windows was about as packed with features as it could get, Adobe has put even more actually useful niceties into the CS4 version of the venerable editing application. Building on its strengths of smooth interaction with other members of the Adobe club of apps, Premiere Pro included functionality and feature sets that were sorely needed in previous versions. There are also some unexpected surprises within the mix.

Tipping its hat to the tapeless workflow that’s largely taken over video production, Adobe makes it easier than ever to log clips, add production notes and keep track of your projects with its new metalogging feature. In old versions of Premiere you could enter metadata attached to clips, but this enhancement lets you enter info into fields like a spreadsheet, tabbing from one to the next, lickety-split. Making matters even easier, you can now also select a huge group of clips and add an important piece of metadata to them (such as your copyright info), all in one stroke. Nice. It’s simple to use and streamlines a tedious yet crucial task that is so important to today’s digital workflows. read more...