Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

Bruce Bicknell

Premiere has long been a favorite among the professionals in the industry due to its robust features and its seamless integration with the other Adobe products. While each version has only gotten better, the folks at Adobe have come out swinging for the fences and hit a homerun with Premiere Pro CS5! These new features are plentiful and go a long way in increasing your productivity and creativity.

So, what have the mad scientists at Adobe been up to? What are these new features that will have you lying awake at night, thinking of all the possibilities you will have with your upgrade? Well that’s what you will find out in the article below as we go through the new features that will change your workflow forever. While we can’t dive into every new feature I will give you as much info as I can on what I believe is the best of them. So let’s take a look!

64 Bit Mercury Playback Engine

Premiere Pro steps up the game with a host of new features that centers around the revolutionary Mercury Playback Engine that provides native 64-bit, GPU-accelerated support for Mac and Windows. This feature alone is worth the upgrade as the Mercury Playback Engine gives you dramatic improvements in performance and stability. The frustration of waiting for a project to load, scrub through a hi-res or HD timeline effortlessly or even play through effects and transitions without having to wait for it to render are a thing of the past!

And that’s not all by a long shot! The Mercury Playback Engine takes multitasking to a new level. Utilizing the GPU to accelerate effects, rendering, and other processor-intensive tasks frees your system’s CPU to handle background tasks. The enhanced native 64-bit system architecture in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 lets you use all available system RAM (up to 128GB in today’s computers) so you can run multiple software applications at the same time. This opens the door to powerful timesaving, multitasking workflows. For example, you can simultaneously edit a very complex, effects-laden project in Adobe Premiere Pro while your system’s CPUs render an elaborate After Effects composition in the background. The improved technology speeds up the processes and allows you to increase your productivity and creativity in ways that you have never seen before.

Have you ever worked on a computer or laptop that has been brought to its knees by footage or sequences that have a large number of effects? If so you will love this! The Mercury Playback Engine gives you the ability to adjust the playback resolution of your video in the Source Monitor or Program Monitor. Separate Playback and Pause resolutions give you more control over monitoring. With high-resolution footage, you can set playback resolution to 1/2 for smooth viewing. Setting Pause resolution to Full allows you to quickly check the quality of focus or edge details when playback is paused—useful for when you don’t have the luxury of an on-set HD monitor. When working with higher resolutions, such as RED 4K footage, you can set playback resolution to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16 for smooth viewing.

Expanded native tapeless workflows in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

Adobe Premiere Pro builds upon the industry’s best native tapeless workflow by offering new native format support for Sony XDCAM HD 50, Panasonic AVCCAM, DPX, and AVC-Intra. In addition, native support has been added for video shot on Canon, Nikon, and other DSLR cameras. Plus, full native support for RED R3D files means you can import them directly without installing additional software.

Adobe Premiere Pro lets you combine a wide range of sources—with different resolutions, frame rates, and aspect ratios—in a single sequence without complex format conversions. For example, if you drop a RED R3D clip into an HD sequence, the clip will be automatically cropped to the HD frame size automatically. Similarly, if you drop an SD clip into a sequence in an HD project, the clip will be pillar-boxed automatically. Thanks to the Mercury Playback Engine and broad native format support, mixed-format timelines can be edited in real time. The only time that rendering occurs is when you send your sequence to Adobe Media Encoder for output in virtually any major delivery formats.

Fast, accurate keying with Ultra

Ultra, the powerful new high-performance keyer in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, lets you achieve fast, accurate keying on even the most challenging DV and HD footage—footage shot under real-world conditions typically found in production that include uneven lighting, wrinkled backgrounds, and frizzy hair. Ultra preserves shadows and can achieve complex keys on smoke, liquids, and transparent objects. The GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine dramatically increases rendering speeds, usually resulting in real-time HD keying.

Face Detection

Save even more time with Face Detection. By running another content-analysis process on clips in your project, you can quickly locate files with human faces in them. Because these clips are more likely to contain spoken dialogue, Face Detection eliminates the painstaking process of having to play through each clip in a project to find, for example, interview sound bites or establishing shots.

Open workflows with Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer

Moving media and sequences between tools made by different companies in complex production pipelines often requires format conversion, specialized plug-ins, tedious workarounds, or a lot of manual work to recreate elements that don’t survive the transfer process. Interoperability between Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, as well as between Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid NLEs such as Media Composer, means you can share files and timelines without conversion or rendering, preserving commonly used effects and transitions, saving valuable production time.

Collaborative review and approval workflows with CS Review

Clients, project managers, and members of production teams don’t always work in the same location, in the same city, or even in the same country. CS Review* provides a fast and simple way for teammates and clients to take part in reviewing video sequences, using just a web browser and easy-to-use annotation tools.

Unlike other services that offer online review of creative content, CS Review lets you publish a review to the web directly from within Adobe Premiere Pro. Encode sequences in the background and automatically upload them for review and collaboration. When colleagues and clients make comments while viewing the content in a web browser, those comments are dynamically captured and displayed directly in the new Review panel in Adobe Premiere Pro alongside the sequence they relate to. Jump directly to comments in the timeline to efficiently match feedback to specific elements, and keep track of review comments in one location.

Because reviews are accessed simply through a web browser, CS Review brings your teammates and clients into the review process in near-real time, regardless of where they are or on what computer they are viewing content. When you need to view or archive reviews offline, they can be easily saved as JPG or FLV files.

Password protection helps to maintain control over who can create a new review, make and respond to comments, or just read comments. The ability to set deadlines, track reviewer participation, and view comments as they are posted help you further manage the review process.

New output options and metadata controls in Adobe Media Encoder

Adobe Premiere Pro lets you produce video optimized for distribution practically anywhere.
Adobe Media Encoder—a separate 64-bit application included with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5— lets you output your video project in all of the major video formats using a flexible batch list. Batch encoding takes place in the background, freeing you to focus on creative work. Its enhanced user interface provides more visual feedback to help you work faster, while the new ability to start the encoding process immediately from within Adobe Premiere Pro without going to the Adobe Media Encoder batch list saves you time.

When batch encoding, you can use any combination of sequences and clips as sources, and encode to a wide variety of video formats, including FLV, F4V, Windows Media, QuickTime, and other popular codecs such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264.

Wrapping up

Just quick thanks for checking out the awesome new features of Premiere Pro CS5. This release is by far one of the most exciting releases to date and one that is a must have upgrade for all of you Premiere Pro users who want to step up your game.

About the Author

Bruce Bicknell is a video and animation specialist who is the founder of Digital Blue Productions. He has been an instructor on Adobes in-box training as well as published in Photoshop User, Layers Magazine, ATI Red, MacTribe and PhotoshopCAFE. His clients include Time Inc., DTCC, KW Media and has worked with magazines that include People, National Geographic, Adventure,
Photoshop User, and Layers magazines to name a few. Bruce is also an instructor at Sessions.edu teaching video and graphics courses.