I checked out the competition last week at the Adobe Production Premium CS4 Road Show. First impression is that this is not really all competition since the tools included in the Production Premium CS4 Suite can be used with Final Cut Pro. They had some very cool stuff going on that I’ll talk about over two posts. This first post includes Premiere, Encore, Photoshop, and OnLocation.
Adobe Premier
To be fair, I haven’t touched Premier for a number of years so I had no expectations going in. There were a lot of features that really impressed me.
The most impressive would have to be the editing native tapeless HD formats directly from the card. This means P2, XDCAM, RED, etc. Really awesome. This wowed me especially because a week before I was working on getting Sony’s XDCAM footage into Final Cut and it took a little time. In Premier they opened the card from the media browser and you could drag and drop the files directly into the timeline.
There are numerous advantages to being able directly edit the native format. You can easily shoot a test on location, load it into Premier (or After Effects) and make sure that you are getting what you want/need. I had to do this on set with Final Cut Pro and DV Tapes and it was a pain to have to sit and import the footage again. After a while though, we started to shoot and capture at the same time so that solved the problem.
They have a Media Browser window within the program that allows you to browse files on your hard drive and even preview them without having to add them to the project. Once you find what you want, you just drag it to the timeline and it adds it to the project.
Editing native also allows you to easily transfer the files from machine to machine. For example, if you needed to switch from your laptop to your desktop, you can just save the project onto a jumpstick and keep the files on the original tapeless format. This way you can get an entire edit around on 2 cards that fit in your pocket. That’s cool.
Premier CS4 gives you the ability to directly import projects from Final Cut Pro. This means they include the motion controls, titles, all the keyframes (also read in After Effects!), transitions, etc. You could edit everything and then pull it into Premier and use the additional tools in the Production Premium as you wish. For me, this would be killer and almost worth it just for After Effects. I use it a lot in my workflow and going back and forth is a pain.
The great thing about the workflow in Premier is that you can easily transfer between the different programs. You can right click on a file and send it to another program like After Effects, Photoshop, Encore, Soundbooth, etc. You can pretty much do the same thing with the Final Cut Studio. Again, the After Effects transfer is the part that is most intriguing to me. Especially because you can make changes in AE and see them instantly in the Premier timeline.
The last cool feature in Adobe Premier CS4 is the speech to text tool. Always a cool idea, usually poorly executed, but it looked pretty legit in the demo. It takes the speech in a video and converts it to text that is then mapped to the timecode. This means that you can edit by word and also search your video based on the dialogue. It’s also easy to go in and fix any errors the automated process might have made.
They also demoed this technology embedded into a Flash player online. This allows you to search through video just like you would search text on the web.
Adobe Encore
The coolest thing about Adobe’s DVD program Encore is that it allows you to publish the DVD to a flash file. This means that you can export your entire DVD, menus and all and then upload it to the internet. In theory, you could create an entire website directly from Encore. Or instead of asking someone to watch your film on YouTube, you can send them to your slick DVD website.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop, always awesome. Adobe Photoshop CS4 has a revamped 3D engine which allows you to bring in models from programs like Maya and Cinema4D and edit them directly in Photoshop. I’m not a 3D guy, but I see how this could be really useful to someone who was.
They have a new feature called Content Aware Scale that lets you scale images without distorting the subject. Its a little hard to explain, but check out this video:
Adobe OnLocation
Now available on the Mac. For those of you familiar with sets, it is basically a Video Assist program that captures footage live via firewire and allows you to log and capture the clips on the fly. You can also make simple color adjustments, audio edits, and fill in metadata to help you sort the clips later.
The program seems pretty cool and interesting, but you can do this within Final Cut Pro by using the Log and Capture window while you are plugged in to the live camera via firewire. I did not see anything at the road show that really made this program stand out.
Tomorrow I will have part 2 of my review. Check back!
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