Video for the internet star

There was a time when Premiere was the editing application on the Mac. Then Final Cut Pro and iMovie appeared. That prompted Avid to create consumer and prosumer versions of its expensive pro products, and Premiere quietly disappeared from the Mac landscape. But Adobe brought its video editor back a few versions ago, and this latest version is ready to do battle with Final Cut Pro–but it’s also charging too hard into the prosumer market.

Zombie movies = great. Zombie weddings? Not so much.

Premiere is meant to work seamlessly with the CS5 suite. To take full advantage of the new Premiere, you’ll want to use the CS Live service (Adobe’s new cloud-based apps), Adobe Story, and the included OnLocation. Adobe Story allows you to collaborate on scripts and seamlessly integrate those scripts with your Premiere project, thanks to the bundled OnLocation. That app will scan your footage and decide where it goes in your project by transcribing the dialogue and matching it with your script. For editors, line producers, and first assistant directors, the feature is worth its weight in RED cameras. CS Live services are free for 12 months if you register by April 30, 2011. After that, the service will cost you, although Adobe hasn’t settled on a price yet. And considering the high price of Adobe’s products, we’re not impressed that they’re trying to get us to pay even more.

OnLocation not only syncs your dialogue with your script, but also creates metadata that stays with your project from ingestion to output. Oddly, if you want to analyze a clip that isn’t attached to a story (an interview, for example) to extract the speech to text, you need to do so in Premiere. Even that strange decision by Adobe doesn’t diminish the power of OnLocation. The amount of metadata you can assign to clips is immense. You can generate alerts and audio peaks for clips so you can find trouble spots before dropping the clips into the timeline. In addition, you can tag your clips using a 4-star rating system and, with one click, signify if a clip is good or not.

Thankfully, the Premiere workflow hasn’t changed much. The alterations seem like they’ve been there all along and only helped us work faster. For example, the ability to quickly find and remove gaps in a timeline means not having to worry about flash frames. Also, you can import DSLR video files. More important, though, are the under-the-hood changes. Premiere has finally been rewritten to take advantage of 64-bit architecture. If you have a Mac Pro stuffed with RAM–and if you’re doing heavy video editing, you should–Premiere can leverage all of it. Another performance boost comes from the new Mercury Playback Engine, which uses the Nvidia CUDA technology on your Nvidia GPU to render video on the fly in the timeline. This means less rendering before editing and more time cutting.

Premiere is clearly geared toward high-end prosumers and stacks up nicely against Final Cut Pro in that setting. But if you need a little video-editing hand-holding, Premiere doesn’t have some of the tiny features that we’d hope to see to get these users up to speed. For example, Final Cut Pro detects the settings of a video file the first time you place it in a sequence, and if there’s a difference, Final Cut Pro gives you the option to change the sequence settings on the fly. Powerful stuff. Really, if you’re an experienced Premiere user, your workflow has to hit a sweet spot in order to justify this upgrade. If you’re shooting narrative projects, Premiere and its accompanying applications and services shine. For things like interviews, weddings, or documentaries, however, Premiere CS4 is still more than adequate.