TV Tech: Adobe Production Premium v5.5

TV Technology by Michael Hanish

Breaking with their corporate tradition of releasing a major Creative Suite update every two years, Adobe has released a mid-cycle product, Creative Suite 5.5. This contains significant new features and improvements that should be of vital interest to all media creators. In this review, we will look at the new features in Production Premium 5.5, a subset of the entire Creative Suite, which consists of Premiere Pro CS5.5, After Effects CS5.5, Audition CS5.5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Flash Catalyst CS 5.5, Flash Professional CS5.5, Illustrator CS5, OnLocation CS5, Encore CS5, Dynamic Link, Bridge CS5, Device Central CS5.5, and Media Encoder CS5.5. And considering the huge mass of software even this subset contains, we will concentrate on changes and improvements to the tools of most interest to editors, FX artists, and media producers at large: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Media Encoder.

FEATURES

Premiere Pro CS 5.5 is a full-featured NLE that has been gaining favor among editors for its robust toolset, ability to play any format and codec without transcoding, and tight integration with other applications in the Suite through Dynamic Link. New features in this release include greatly improved Mercury Playback Engine optimization (which, on a system equipped with an NVIDIAGPU, allows for real-time playback of even heavy sequences of effects without rendering); keyboard shortcut presets which allow the application to be driven by the same keystrokes as Final Cut Pro, Avid, or even an editor's customized set; Merge Clips (a feature designed in support of dual audio system recording, which allows for up to 16 audio clips to be synced to a single video clip using in-point, out-point, timecode, or numbered markers as the reference).

You can also expect to find greatly expanded Metadata support and integration (which provides the capability for speech recognition and search, the ability to use a script to move sequences and assets through the entire production workflow using Adobe Story).

There are also greatly expanded options for editing tools to perform insert and overwrite edits, frame extraction, and key framing; expanded native RED support for digital cinema workflows; expanded closed captioning support; edit in Audition, a smooth round trip workflow for audio fixes and sweetening; and tightly integrated, multiformat encoding through Adobe Media Encoder. read more...