Digital Video - October 2008 - (Page 6)

FIRST LOOK ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE 4 USER FRIENDLY THE LATEST UPDATES MARK MAJOR GROWTH FOR ADOBE, INTEGRATING BETTER CONTROLS, SUPPORT FOR TAPELESS CAMERAS. CS4 and After Effects CS4 is the native support for various tapeless camera formats. You can natively edit content from Panasonic P2 (DVCPRO, DVCPRO HD and AVC-Intra) and Sony XDCAM HD and XDCAM EX media without transcoding or rewrapping. Premiere Pro can access the metadata for these clips and edit directly from the cards or use its built-in Media Browser to transfer the media to your local media drives for better performance. Running Premiere Pro CS4 on a dual-core 2.8GHz iMac was a pleasure. Native 720/23.98p DVCPROHD clips (imported from P2) played smoothly and JKL transport controls were very responsive, even on media playing from the internal drive. Although not technically part of this release, Adobe is currently working with RED Digital Cinema to develop a plug-in that would enable Premiere Pro and After Effects users to natively edit with RED’s .R3D camera raw files. You can see demos of how this will work at Dave Helmly’s blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/). Adobe recognizes the potential of a raw workflow and plans to give editors access to debayering, gamma, ISO and white balance controls within their software. The most radical change in the Production Premium bundle is Adobe OnLocation CS4. The interface has been “Adobe-ized” and no longer sports the appearance of physical test gear installed in a rack. It now runs on both Macs and PCs and operates as the front-end, direct-to-disk recorder for an integrated end-to-end Adobe workflow. As before, it turns your desktop or laptop into a recording station, complete with monitor (your screen) and software scopes, but it now features better clip management and the ability to add metadata to clips. DV and HDV cameras connected via FireWire work with OnLocation. www.dv.com BY OLIVER PETERS I ’ll focus my comments on Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium – the collection for video professionals. Across the board, Adobe has concentrated on several big improvements and additions between CS3 and CS4. These include user interface changes, searchable metadata based on XMP support and speech-to-text technology. The user interfaces of the various applications continue to move closer to a common Adobe layout. This tabbed workspace design is most completely implemented in Premiere Pro, After Effects and Soundbooth. Most of the applications have gained search fields that operate like Apple’s Spotlight. Typing information into the search field of a Premiere Pro bin will filter the displayed contents to match your criteria. In After Effects, for example, you can filter timeline layers to only display tracks where the object’s position has been altered, by typing “position” into the search field. Most of the applications have been metadata-enabled, so meaningful descriptions, titles, keywords and copyright information can be captured and embedded into files using open source XMP technology. Both Premiere Pro and Soundbooth dv october 2008 have added a speech recognition technology called Speech Search to automatically transcribe dialogue into searchable text. After the transcription process is complete, simply click on a word in the generated text (now part of the clip’s metadata) and the media file will instantly cue to the corresponding point. It’s a great technology, but I was less than satisfied with the accuracy of the automatic transcription. I picked one of Adobe’s demo clips (an interview with Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Rob Legato) and had Soundbooth create a transcription. Legato speaks quickly but clearly; however, the accuracy was only about 50% and turned such phrases as “a short shooting schedule” into “the court shaving scandal.” The accuracy was better on a different test file, but still at least 25% of the phrases were incorrect. In spite of that, Speech Search seems like a very useful tool for documentary editors. In fact, even some Avid editors have theorized that you could use Soundbooth CS4 to create transcriptions that in turn could be imported into Avid Media Composer for use with their ScriptSync feature. Aside from Speech Search, the biggest new product feature in Adobe Premiere Pro 6 http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/ http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - October 2008

Digital Video - October 2008 Contents First Look: Creative Suite 4 D800 Raid Edirol F-1 Video Field Recorder Universal Dolly BT-LH1760 Monitor Bench Test: XDCAM EX PMW-EX1 Camcorder The Dead Can Dance Cutting Crew Unrest In Peace DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - October 2008

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