Now that there are so many ways to use video on the web and other devices, Premiere^R Pro has become an important part of the Creative Suite^R. With the release of Creative Suite 4, we have some new features that will streamline your work.

One of the most important upgrades to Premiere Pro CS4 is the new organization and preview features. Using the Media Browser panel, you can preview a clip or other asset before importing it into your project. On the left of the panel, you can navigate through the folder tree to your list of assets and on the right of the panel you can use the drop-down menu to filter which assets you wish to preview. Once you preview the asset and decide to use it in your project, you simply drag it to the Timeline or Project Panel. You can even preview and import tapeless camera format files. When importing a clip into your project, you have control over what parts of the clip to import, such as audio, video or both. You also have precise control over the placement of the asset and how its import will affect the other items on the Timeline.

Asset management and metadata information are important parts of working efficiently. It is now much easier to maintain metadata across CS4 programs. In the Project Panel, you can search for assets and edit the metadata for that asset. Any changes made in Premiere Pro will appear in other programs such as Adobe Bridge. You can also customize the metadata to be displayed by creating a new schema or list of information to include in the metadata display.

Integration between Premiere and Photoshop^R is much improved. You have more control over how Photoshop layers are imported into Premiere. You can choose to maintain the Photoshop layers, merge some or all layers or omit layers. When a Photoshop layer includes a video, the video layer is preserved.

Speech recognition is a new feature that will become a favorite tool when working with large projects. Premiere Pro can transcribe the audio (speech) from a video clip and convert it to searchable and editable text. Beginning in the Metadata panel, you can choose the language, quality and speaker. This will launch Adobe Media Encoder and the speech is rendered to text. When done, the text appears in a pane of the Metadata panel. You can then search for target words and clicking on these words will take you to the corresponding location in the video where that word was spoken. You can see how this will help you navigate through a large project.

You have more advanced control over applying effects to your video clips. In the Effect Controls panel, you can apply multiple effects to a clip and then save that combination of effects as a preset to be used again in other projects or within the same project.

Exporting and batch encoding has been upgraded to include several presets for the most common formats. Once you choose a preset from the Effect Controls panel, Adobe Media Encoder will launch and do all the encoding for you.

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