A new Metadata panel lets you view and input information about a clip or its source file.
Along with the video and audio, Premiere Pro recognizes additional shot information encoded in the file, making it easy to organize and search the footage without intermediate steps.Įnhanced support for metadata is one of Premiere Pro CS4’s most prominent new features. And Premiere Pro CS4 not only supports the media, but its metadata, as well. The file types you can now import into Premiere Pro CS4 include a wider array of tapeless formats, including P2, AVCHD, XDCAM EX, and XDCAM HD. It also lets you view prospective source material in Premiere Pro’s Source Monitor before actually importing the file into the project. And by allowing you to sift the items it lists by file type, it makes finding the footage you want even easier. As part of the Premiere Pro interface, the Media Browser provides a more convenient way to search for footage than using the traditional Import command and dialog box.
And as in the previous version, Premiere Pro for the Mac can’t display HDV footage in the Capture panel you’ll have to use your camcorder’s built-in screen or an attached monitor instead.įor previewing and importing assets into a project, Premiere Pro CS4 incorporates a new Media Browser panel. But because the subclips are linked to a single, large master clip and media file, managing media and storage space could be more difficult. Both master clips and subclips work fine when it comes to editing.
But on the Mac, Premiere Pro captures a single master clip and creates a subclip for each shot. On Windows, Premiere Pro’s Scene Detect feature identifies points on the tape where the camera stopped between shots and captures the shots as separate master clips, each linked to a corresponding media file.
But it also retains some of the previous version’s shortcomings, and represents one of the few areas where differences remain between Premiere Pro for Mac and Windows. It provides a unified interface for specifying capture settings, controlling a wide range of camcorders and decks, logging, and batch capture. When you do need to capture from tape, you can use Premiere Pro CS4’s Capture panel, which differs little from the previous version.
Premiere Pro CS4 comes with Adobe OnLocation CS4 (shown here), which turns your laptop into a portable field monitor, video measurement tool, and capture device. You can also use the program to capture video to a hard disc while shooting, bypassing the additional step of capturing footage later from videotape. (However, users accustomed to traditional video devices might wish that OnLocation’s waveform monitor didn’t measure the video signal in terms of RGB instead of IRE, the customary metric, named for the Institute of Radio Engineers). OnLocation not only lets your laptop serve as a field monitor, but also as a portable waveform monitor and vectorscope, instruments used to accurately measure video luminance and chrominance levels. OnLocation CS4 gives Mac users a valuable production tool that allows them to use a laptop to monitor and capture video in the field.
Until Adobe decides to restore Ultra to the package, users can turn to the Keylight effect included with After Effects for professional keying, but will have to look elsewhere for virtual set features. The absence of Ultra, a program for keying subjects (such as those shot against a greenscreen) and compositing them with virtual sets, may simply reflect Adobe’s desire to equalize the Mac and Windows versions, albeit at the expense of Windows users.