Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 review

OnLocation CS4

The other application bundled with Premiere Pro is OnLocation CS4. It's the software introduced with CS3 that turns a laptop into a hard-disk recorder on steroids. As well as capturing footage live to a format that's immediately editable in Premiere Pro, it provides a much larger preview than a camcorder's LCD, plus live waveform, vectorscope and audio spectrum readouts. This works over FireWire, supporting DV, HDV and DVCPRO.

Alas, Adobe neglected to include it in our reviewer's copy of CS4 and couldn't get us a copy in time for this review.

Stronger together

Premiere Pro CS4 still has the odd niggle._We could do with more elaborate_title animation options than_just rolls and crawls. Sure, you can_do virtually anything you like with text in After Effects, but it's very time-consuming to be forced to do so - and expensive, if that's all you use this heavyweight compositing tool for. Adobe_also seems to be deliberately pushing customers towards Production Premium by not offering a bundle including just Soundbooth and Premiere Pro. The £800_price difference between the two is_quite a leap, although you can buy Soundbooth on its own for £150.

Premiere Pro faces a continuing challenge in winning over the high-end of video professionals. But as a tool for video producers crossing over between web and more traditional methods of distribution, it has a strong case. The batch-encoding tool will be a particularly powerful weapon.

And this is where its greatest strength lies: in its role as part of a suite of interoperating programs. While Premiere Pro CS4 is a great video-editing tool, having tools such as Encore and OnLocation to back it up, plus Soundbooth and After Effects in Production Premium, is what makes

it a particularly persuasive package.

Author: James Morris