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Edit Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Jan Ozer

Workflow enhancements and support for new formats add up to a must-have upgrade.

Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Suite 4 (CS4) is out and shipping in all its glory. You've probably heard lots about it. In this review, I'll pull the major points together and review CS4's new features within the workflow of a typical project, from preproduction planning to rendering and authoring.

First, some housekeeping details. Premiere Pro CS4 includes an updated OnLocation as well as Encore; it retails for $799, with upgrades starting at $299. Or you can get Premiere Pro as part of CS4 Production Premium ($1,699/$599) or CS4 Master Collection ($2,499/$899). With this as background, let's jump in.

OnLocation

OnLocation started life as Serious Magic DV Rack, which converted a desktop or laptop computer into a waveform monitor and digital video recorder and offered related tools. In CS4, Adobe completely reworked the interface and added native Mac compatibility (rather than relying on a product such as BootCamp for Windows-based operation on a Mac). The facelift is mostly terrific, except there is one hiccup worth noting: Adobe configured the default screen of the waveform monitor using the RGB scale, which has values from 0 to 255. Most shooters are much more familiar with the IRE scale, which runs from 1 to 100, and it is universally used in zebra stripes on camcorders (and in OnLocation's own zebras) and in Premiere Pro's internal waveform monitor.

The initial version of OnLocation didn't have a screen with IRE values, but with version 4.0.1, Adobe added the screen. It's still not the default, which is silly, but nobody asked me. Long story short, if you prefer IRE values on your waveform, get the update.

Otherwise, Adobe added several key new functions. Users can now create a shot list in a preproduction workspace and add metadata to clips captured via the DVR. Overall, most users just want the scopes and DVR, and the new interface makes OnLocation much more usable.

Ingest

The big new format addition to CS4 is AVCHD, which you import via the traditional File > Import command rather than via a special import procedure. Adobe edits AVCHD natively rather than using an intermediate codec, which seems to work better on the Mac than in Windows — though perhaps this relates more to the configurations of the computers I used in testing.

To explain, Apple loaned me a Mac Pro with two quad-core 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processors and 8GB of RAM. For Windows, I used an HP xw6600 with two quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon processors and 3GB of RAM. Simply by virtue of processor speed, the Mac should have performed about 15 percent faster than the xw6600, and most results were in this neighborhood.

On a simple 4-minute AVCHD project, the Mac rendered the project to Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 in 11:46 (min:sec), while the Windows workstation took 68:34. I checked memory usage in the Windows Task Manager, which reported that page-file usage was around 2.5GB — a hefty chunk of the total. Tough to tell if this was a memory- or CPU-use issue, since the Mac used up to 75 percent of CPU resources, according to the Activity Monitor; the HP peaked at about 46 percent, according to Task Manager.

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