What's new in Premiere Pro?

What's new in Premiere Pro CS5 & CS5.5?

The latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro ships in May 2011.  Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 takes the strengths and stability of CS5 which was released in May 2010, and adds some exciting new features.  Below we will list out all the changes in both CS5 and CS5.5, since most people will be looking at what is new probably will not have either of these versions.  For those of you who have CS5 a short list of the new CS5.5 features can be found on our blog: http://news.dvc.uk.com/blog/_archives/2011/4/11/4792820.html

There are two really big changes with Premiere Pro 5:

1. 64 bit application
2. Mercury playback engine

64 bit application

One of the main aims for Premiere Pro CS5 is stability.  Premiere has a bit of a reputation for crashing, which we think is not entirely fair, although other programs, such as Grass Valley EDIUS, have been better.  Adobe want to change this and make CS5 ultra-stable.  Like everyone who makes video editing programs, however, they have a problem - there are lots of different types of video, both standard definition and high definition and most are compressed somehow, not just using simple compression like DV or MJPEG where every frame is a complete picture, but much harder to use formats like MPEG and AVCHD where to find one frame you need to look at several nearby frames.  This requires processing power and memory.

Unfortunately "old fashion" Windows such as Windows XP, are 32 bit applications and can only see about 3GB memory maximum.  Even when you stop using an old version of Windows and start using a nice brand new 64 bit version of Windows 7 which can see a lot more memory (we have supplied computers with 24GB memory installed recently) most editing programs are still only 32 bit.  So even if your PC sees all the memory the editing program won't use it, and, in fact, is normally stuck with just using 2GB.  The editing program also won't be able to properly use all the cores of your processor if it is 32bit - and since the latest processors are coming with effectively 8 cores, with some having 12 cores, you really want the editing program to use all that power.  The way to do that is make the editing program 64 bit.

Sony Vegas was one of the first programs to be available as a 64 bit application and it definitely works better and faster as a result.  Now Adobe have completely re-vamped Premiere to be a full blown 64 bit application.  They have done the same with After Effects CS5 as well, although Encore, Soundbooth and a lot of their other programs remain 32 bit.  Apple have just announced thaFCPX will be 64 but and Avid have said Avid Media Composer 5.5 will be "the last 32 bit version"  Why does it take people so long to upgrade their programs?  Simply because it takes a lot of effort, programmers have to re-write the whole program - in the process sometimes not including everything that was in the program before.  Adobe decided the programs that would benefit the most would be Premiere Pro and After Effects, so these were the first two to be made 64bit.  They also chose to make a 64bit version of the Adobe Media Encoder, which needs to convert files into different formats as quickly as possible and so wants to use as much memory and processing power as it can and really benefits from being 64 bit.  Even though programs like Adobe Encore are still 32bit they do benefit from 64bit Premiere if using the Dynamic link to make Blu-ray or DVD discs since when encoding a lot of the work on the timeline is still handled by Adobe Premiere Pro.

Ok so what does this mean in reality?

In means faster processing, the ability to handle larger projects and an end to "out of memory" messages.  Because memory problems are a large cause of instability it also means a much more stable program. 

Are there any downsides to being a 64 bit application?

1.  You must have a 64 bit computer with a 64 bit operating system - pretty obvious really but a lot of people will not have a 64 bit o/s.  We have been supplying all our systems with a 64 bit o/s for the last year or so, and even systems we have supplied with 32 bit o/s will work with a 64 bit operating system - so maybe all you need to do is have a new version of Windows installed.   Machines that are 4-5 years old may not be capable of running a 64 bit operating system.   CS5 will only work on Windows Vista or Windows 7, it will not work on Windows XP 64 bit.   If you are going to install a new operating system on your machine then Windows 7 Pro 64 bit is the obvious choice; Windows 7 Ultimate is an alternative, but does not given you much more for video work than Windows 7 Pro.  Although you can use Windows 7 home 64 bit,  64 bit Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate are recommended by Adobe.  If you want your machine updated with a new Windows as well as Adobe CS5 then give us a call and we can talk you through the options.

2. Premiere Pro CS5 will ONLY work with 64 bit plug-ins and 64 bit codecs.  Since most old plug-ins are currently 32 bit this means you will need updated versions from the makers of the plug-in.  Many of these are now available.     The same is true for After Effects and many of the plug-in manufacturers have been working on these new plug-ins already.

You can also only read files that have 64 bit codecs.  All the common codecs will load anyway such as QuickTime files,  XDCAM, DVCPro HD, AVCHD and MPEG4.  Manufacturers like Matrox and Black Magic have written their own 64 bit codecs, so they will not be a problem either.  Grass Valley, although EDIUS has not yet become a 64 bit application have written a 64 bit version of their codec provided you have EDIUS 6 and the dongle plugged into the machine you are using.

In reality this has not been a huge problem since the launch of CS5 but maybe if you have some really old footage lying around somewhere with a codec that is not used much any more.

THE MERCURY PLAYBACK ENGINE

Introduced in CS5 the Mercury Playback Engine normally refers to Premiere's way of playing back effects.  It uses the CUDA chips found on certain nVidia graphic cards to do effects inside Premiere Pro in realtime - meaning you do not have to render nearly as much as you would have to in previous versions of Premiere.

Adobe have only validated certain graphic cards although it is possible to make this work on practically any modern nVidia graphic card.  The Mercury Playback Engine does not work with other makes of graphic card like ATI or Matrox as they do not have these CUDA chips.  This does not mean that Premeire will not work on these cards, you just have to do more rendering.

With CS5.5 Adobe have added more effects to the list of accelerated effects including the keyframable slow motion (called Time-remapping) as well as field order changes and flicker removal - many things that you may have to apply to long sections of clip no longer need rendering!

Click here for more information regarding the Mercury Playback Engine, including which graphic cards are the correct ones, our opinion of which is the best and many other details.

New video formats supported

Adobe used to be behind everyone else when it came to supporting new formats, now they are ahead of most people.  CS5 adds support for Still camera video formats as well as proper Red camera support.  The Digital SLR settings will be of particular interest as a lot of people are starting to film HD video on still image cameras like the Canon EOS 50D .  Many of these were supported in Premiere Pro CS4 but they would not play back very well.  Not so with CS5!

Adobe's aim is that you use the native footage - i.e. the footage exactly as filmed - and don't change it into another format.  Ideally that is what we would all like to do - copy the footage off the camera hard drive/card, throw it into the editing program and start editing.  How well it works will depend on your computer so buy a nice new powerful computer to edit new HD formats.  Playback and performance is also helped by using the right graphic card.  If you want to see CS5 in operation with these new formats then come to the open day or pop down for a demo sometime.

EDIT IN AUDITION-new in cs5.5

Audition, Adobe's powerful audio editing program, has been totally remade and reworked for 5.5.  We now have a MAC and a PC version (previously Audition 3 was PC ONLY).  Audition also replaces Soundbooth in the Adobe Production Studio.  Adobe have created a special dynamic link between Audition and Premiere Pro CS5.5 - you can edit your video in Premiere and then send the whole timeline, with the individual audio clips laid out as they are in Premiere to Audition for editing, and then send the audio mix back to Premiere as a final mix. You can also send to send just one clip for a bit of audio tweaking if you prefer.

Unified audio effects - CS5.5 only

ever been irritated with the 3 different types of audio effects - mono, stereo and 5.1 - which meant you had to choose the right effects based purely on which clip you were using on the timeline?   Well now all the audio effects are in one list! Effects which only apply to stereo clips - like fill left or fill right for example - simply cannot be applied to other types of clips.

Merged clips - CS5.5 only

If you have a video clip and several different audio clips in the project panel you can now "merge" these into one clip - great for people who record their sound separate to the video. You can merge up to 16 audio tracks with one video clip.

Drag clips into the program monitor to insert and overwrite - New in CS5.5

Now if you drag a clip from the source to the program monitor a graphic appears to ask if you want to insert or overwrite.

Improved speech transcription

Provide Premiere Pro CS5 with a script in advance and it will do a much more accurate job of transcribing what is said.  Ideally you write the script in Adobe Story, Adobe's new script writing application, when filming capture the footage using On Location, then inside Premiere use transcribe to match the filming to the Adobe Story script.

This is not really "transcribing" what has been said of course, since you already have the whole script written down, so why would you do it?  Because once the script has been attached to the video clip you can type a word in the project search box and Premiere will find that word in the video clip.  Double click and it takes you to that piece of video.

Analyze content

A feature that has been taken from Premiere Elements - in addition to analyzing the speed Premeire will also analyse the picture and then you can use the search function to find faces as well..

Ultra Keyer now included in Premiere

Ultra was developed as a keying program to do good keys out of DV material and was bought by Adobe a couple of years ago.  You may remember the stand alone application that came with CS3 and a range of "virtual sets".   Ultra disappeared from the Adobe Production Studio with CS4, and has now re-appeared as part of Adobe Premiere.

This is hugely welcome since the keyers included with Premiere are all pretty bad - the only way of getting a decent realtime key with Premiere was by using the Matrox keyer that you would only get by buying a Matrox RT.X2 or Axio.  Now we have the Ultra keyer which does an excellent job and works in realtime.  It is one of the effects which is accelerated by the Mercury Playback Engine but we found it worked really well on a normal i7 computer without the graphic card and did a very good key off some fairly roped footage.

The virtual sets have not made their way into Premiere and there is no intention to do so.  This is not so bad - at the time they came out they looked fairly good, but by today's standards the words cheesy and extremely come to  mind!

Realtime effects

Many of Premiere's native effects are now realtime with the Mercury playback engine.  As you can see from the list this include garbage mattes, keys, 3D filters (the basic 3D filter does a very high quality scaled 3D image) and of course Premiere's colour correction.  The two other icons list also show that some filters have been upgraded to 32 bit and some work in proper YUV colour space so the quality of the filters has been improved as well.

Better quality scaling in realtime

The high quality rendering option introduced in CS4 was great but time consuming.  I would not attempt to use it on any computer except and up-to-date i7 and even then the rendering times are quite long.  However, using CS5 with the right graphic card and all scaling is done at the high quality setting in real time!

Playback resolution

Instead of the old "draft" and "full" buttons we now have several options for play back quality and you have different settings for "playback" and "paused" resolution - so you can play at half quality for better performance, but when paused CS5 will show full quality.

Save a still button!!!!!

This will make many people shout with joy!  With CS4 it actually became a little bit harder to export a still image.  With CS5 Adobe have added a "save a still" button to both the player and the destination window, so find the frame, click the button and a still is saved.  CS5 will not automatically load the still back into the project but the simple addition of the button is a huge time saver.  You can still export stills, or a range of stills, using Media encoder.

Make an instant timeline

Drop a clip on the "new" icon in the project window and CS5 makes a sequence up with settings that match that clip.

CLOSED CAPTIONING- new in CS5.5

More popular in the US than the UK, closed captioning is now supported with the release of Premeire Pro 5.5

Adobe Media Encoder changes

With CS4 Adobe moved the Media Encoder - the part of the program which takes your timeline and changes it to something else - out of Premeire into a stand-alone program.  This means you do not just send Premiere timelines to it, but can throw in any files you want to remake or After Effects compositions. 

With CS5 Media Encoder is 64 bit - so will use multiple processors and more memory better, which means it is faster.  It also work better in the background on the current range of multi-core processor computers -i.e. it will run at the same time as Premiere Pro, meaning you can encode one timeline while working on another.

 There are some other small yet useful changes:

New "match source settings options

Two options that appear on some of the encoders - match sequence settings and options to base certain settings on the source settings.  Both will customising your encoding settings just a little bit easier.

Either queue items or instant export

With CS4 you would choose to send a timeline to Media Encoder, press a button and Media Encoder would load the item, then start encoding.  This is still available and great if you want to encode several items ins a queue or encode things in the background while you carry on working in Premiere Pro.  However, if you are just after a quick export it also adds to the number of clicks and time you have to wait to export some video.  With CS5 you can "export" or "queue" as item. "Queue" will add it to Media Encoder, "export" will make the file there and then.

With CS5.5 you can also simply drag lots of sequences from Adobe Premiere directly to the Media Encoder. You can also create "watch folders" - specify a folder for AME to watch and then any files dropped into that folder will be automatically encoded into the format you specify.

Adobe Encore Changes

With CS4 Adobe added a "dynamic link" to Adobe Encore.  To get a timeline into Encore all you have to do is select it inside Premiere and choose "dynamic link - send to Encore".  This sends the timeline into Encore but does not re-encode the video as with older versions.   Instead it sets up a link.  Now when you change something on the timeline inside of Premiere Encore is automatically updated. You can a make the timeline longer or shorter and move around the Encore chapter markers which you have placed on the Premiere timeline - and you can then update Encore to notice the changes.   This makes remaking DVDs a lot easier.  It also means you can leave Encore to work out the optimal bitrates to fill the DVD with your edit.

Multiple page pop-up menus

Other new features in Encore CS5 are multiple page pop-up menus for Blu-ray discs.  Commercial Blu-ray discs have menus that can pop up over the video as it plays (as opposed to tradition DVD menus which, when accessed, stop the video playing). With CS5 you can make multiple page menus easily.

With CS5.5 Encore is pretty much unchanged.

Better dynamic link

The dynamic link between Premiere and Encore is brilliant - just click a button in Premiere and send the timeline to Encore.  Any changes you make in Premiere will be updated in Encore straight away and all the encoding will happen at the end of the project rather than half way through.  It also means you can let Encore work out all the settings for the video to maximise the disc space and quality of your DVD/Blu-ray.  The Dynamic link was introduced in CS4 and is great when it works - which is 95% of the time.  With CS5 we have not had a problem with teh dynamic link and it is definitely working better for us than in CS4.  Whether it is bullet proof is something we will find out when it gets into the real world but certainly from our experience it is a lot better.  It also means that for large complicated Premiere timelines a lot of the work is done by 64 bit Premiere, meaning faster encoding and better performance.

Encoding in Media Encoder

With Encore you can layout the disc and click build and it will convert all your footage into the right format for you disc (DVD, Blu-ray orFlash) in the process or making the disc.  There was an option in CS4 to "transcode now", which basically meant it started doing the encoding while you were laying out the menus.   This "Encode now" process has now been taken over by the Adobe Media Encoder, so it can harness AME's 64 bit power. 

Matrox now support encoding in Adobe Encore as well as Adobe Premiere using their MAX boards.  These have special chips to encode video into h264 in realtime (as opposed to 3-4 hours for 1 hour footage).   You have to set the bit rate etc yourself if using the MAX Encoding, where as letting Encore decide the settings is easier, but it will save a lot of time!

Do not transcode AVCHD files

An AVCHD file is the correct format for a Blu-ray disc.  However Encore CS4 would always re-encode it.  CS5 does not - add loads of AVCHD files, even put them one after the other onto a timeline without trimming, and Encore will not re-encode them.  Hooray!

New Flash options

Adobe have added new options to the Flash Encoding of Encore.  This is where it will take a laid out DVD or Blu-ray disc and encode it to Sd or HD flash files for inclusion on the web or an intranet.  We use the Flash side of Encore to make the Flash version of our Encore and Premiere Pro training DVDs. 

Now this will add an automatic search box so that the user can type in a word and the player will find that word somewhere in the video it is play - as an example in our tutorial there are several chapters, all named as part of the Encore project.  You type in the phrase you are searching for and the player displays all the chapters with those words included. 

Anyone who has bought the Flash version of our Premiere Pro tutorial can try this out as this disc was made with a pre-release version of Encore CS5!

Search facility in the keyboard customisation box - new in CS5.5

There are loads of commands in Premiere Pro and many have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them.  But what if you want to assign a shortcut to a command - how do you find it?  Now Adobe have added a search box to the keyboard shortcuts customisation list.  Just type in the word for which you are looking -EDIT in the case opposite - and you see all the commands with the word EDIT.

When is CS5.5 available? 

CS5.5 will be shipping in the first half of May 2011

I have a Matrox or Black Magic card, can I use it as soon as CS5 has been released?

If you have a card from a third part manufacturer, such as a Matrox RT.X2 or a Black Magic card then you will have to wait for them to produce new drivers to work with CS5.  Black Magic have already released CS5.5 drivers for their range of cards; we expect Matrox to release drivers in June 2011.   Matrox will only be supporting their MX02 range with Premiere Pro CS5.5, they will not be producing drivers for the RT.X2 and Axio.  The last drivers they will produce for these cards are for use with Premiere Pro CS5, not 5.5.   The RT.X2 and Axio have not bee available for sale for several months.