NAB: POST REVIEWS ADOBE PREMIERE PRO CS5
PRODUCT: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
WEBSITE: www.adobe.com
PRICE: Production Premium CS5: $1,699; upgrade options start at $599. Premiere Pro CS5: $799; upgrade options start at $299.
- 64-bit GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine
- Native support for Red R3D and DSLR formats
- Ultra keyer now included
- Interoperability with Avid and Final Cut Pro
*GPU acceleration with Nvidia graphics cards:
- Quadro CX (Windows)
- Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
- Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac)
- Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
- GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac)
Adobe
truly delivers solutions from “plan to playback.” Earlier this year, I
had an opportunity to visit with the product managers, software
engineers and evangelists up in San Jose, and that clearly was and is
their mantra. In a single page review, I’ve opted to focus my attention
on this new version of Premiere Pro CS5, which I was excited to learn
has now been natively optimized for 64-bit operating systems (which, by
the way, is now a requirement to host).
Powered by the new Mercury
Playback Engine, Premiere Pro CS5 helps you chug through some of your
most congested HD timelines, from the concept to capture and from cut
to distribution. The Mercury Playback Engine pushes the envelope, even
when editing 4K. No matter what your media, Premiere Pro CS5 supports
native tapeless workflows and makes it possible to grab your assets
faster and with more flexibility, including Red R3D, XDCAM HD 50,
AVCCAM and AVC-Intra, as well as DSLR camera video formats, like my
Canon 7D, in 1080p.
MPE — YOU KNOW ME
The
Mercury playback engine provides native 64-bit, GPU-accelerated support
for Mac and Windows, with jaw dropping improvements in speed and
stability. I was able to open projects faster and scrub through HD and
higher resolution projects without a hiccup. The need for rendering has
been drastically sliced and diced with this release. You can see
results instantly when performing multiple color corrections and tasks
such as keying — OMG, keying!
Did I mention that this version is
now shipping with ultra? The ultra cool chroma keyer that makes all of
us appear to be pro-level greenscreen extractors! Even with the most
challenging DV and HD footage — footage shot under
less-than-professional conditions that smell of uneven lighting,
wrinkled backgrounds or Home Depot green paint. Ultra saved me oodles
of time and could even pull complex keys on smoke, hair and transparent
objects. The GPU-accelerated Mercury playback engine pretty much
assures realtime keying for the rest of us who don’t happen to work in
a five-million-dollar post suite near Hollywood and Vine.
GRAPHICALLY ENHANCED
Rendering
my timeline for final output was much faster than before. The Mercury
playback engine works hand-in-hand with Nvidia CUDA technology in a few
choice Nvidia cards (*GPUs) to solve many complex computational
problems in a fraction of the time a CPU would take to perform the same
task. See Mr. Cranky Calculus teacher, I always told you I wouldn’t
have to do math in my real life! There’s way better multitasking, too.
Adobe came up with a super efficient way for your own GPU to accelerate
effects, rendering and other processor-intensive tasks to free up your
CPU(s). And with true 64-bit system architecture in the hizzy you can
stuff your workstation full of RAM, up to 128GB worth — and actually
make use of it all! This means big timesaving and major multitasking. I
can keep cutting away, while simultaneously rendering out a
463-gazillion-layer After Effects composition in the background.
Talk
about mixing and matching! Now in CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro lets you
combine a wide range of sources with different resolutions, frame rates
and aspect ratios. All in a single sequence without head scratching
format conversions. It’s like choosing your toppings at Pinkberry: a
little Red R3D clip here, some anamorphic DV there, a sprinkle of Canon
H.264 HD, and swirl in some DVCPRO HD to top it all off. Because of
this new Mercury thingamajig and broad native format support, you’ll
find as I did: no matter what the flavor, you’re gonna be cutting in
realtime, baby! The only time that rendering occurs is when you output
your sequence to Adobe Media Encoder for output.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Talk
about a friendly AP. Moving media and sequences between editors made by
different companies in complex production pipelines can involve format
conversion, specialized plug-ins, tedious workarounds, or a lot of
manual work to recreate elements that don’t hold up after the transfer
process. Interoperability is now seamless between Premiere and both
Final Cut and Avid.
DELIVERY OPTIONS
You
can also produce video optimized for distribution practically anywhere.
Adobe Media Encoder, which is also a native 64-bit app included in the
suite — lets you output your video project in all of the major video
formats using a simple batch list. Batch encoding takes place in the
background, so you can keep working (or not). I found the new interface
gives you even more visual feedback to help you work more efficiently,
while the added ability to start the encoding process immediately from
within Premiere Pro without going to the Adobe Media Encoder batch list
saves a bundle of time. When batch encoding, you can use any
combination of sequences and clips as sources, and encode to anything
from FLV, F4V, Windows Media, QuickTime, and other trendy codecs such
as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264.
Tor Rolf Johansen is an LA-based Director/Producer. He can be reached at: tor@torphoto.com.