Adobe Premiere Pro Training

The 4.1 update for Premiere Pro CS4, announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in April, has been released. Aside from bug fixes and performance improvements, the 4.1 release gives Premiere Pro greater support for projects authored in Avid Media Composer, and files in the MXF-wrapped IMX format. With the 4.1 update, Premiere Pro can import files in the VOB format used in DVD publishing. Also, the 4.1 release gives greater support to the REDCODE plugin, used for importing files from RED cameras into Premiere Pro.

Check for new updates for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. (Choose Help > Updates.)

Let Dave Helmly walk you through the new compatibilities for Premiere Pro and After Effects in his video tutorial New Premiere Pro 4.1 and After Effects 9.02 Update

To give an overview of the compatibilities that this dot release adds to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Adobe Marketing released Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 4.1.

The following topics in Premiere Pro web Help have been added or revised because of, or coincidental with, changes made to Premiere Pro with the 4.1 update:

Create a sequence for RED camera footage (with RED plugin only)
Regarding the RED plugin, see also the readme file that is downloaded with the plugin, titled "Premiere Pro and After Effects workflow using the Red plugin," and the RED Adobe Workflow Guide.

File formats supported for import

Find assets in the Project panel

Audio Mixer overview

Monitor volume level from Timeline, or Program Monitor

About capturing and digitizing

About transferring files

Import files with the Media Browser

Import files with the Import command

Importing assets from tapeless formats

Modifying clip properties with Interpret Footage

Interpret footage

Edit a text transcript

Set display quality

Formats exported directly from Adobe Premiere Pro

Place a bar behind text in a title

Media preferences

24p workflow

DVD or Blu-ray Disc workflow

Pro Tools workflow

SWF workflow

Cross-application workflows

Metadata workflow

Optimizing your operating system

Updates have been released also for After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder. Be sure to stop by Todd Kopriva's After Effects Region of Interest for more about the AE update in general, and about the RED plugin specifically.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 9:15 AM | Permalink

If you found it difficult to use the Adobe TV interface for finding Adobe's free video Design Center tutorials for Premiere Pro CS4, you were not alone. So Adobe has posted a web page that makes them much easier to find. You might like to bookmark Learn Adobe Premiere CS4 and return to it whenever you have a tutorial need.

Learn Adobe Premiere CS4

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 12:57 PM | Permalink

During NAB, Adobe announced an upcoming update, 4.1, to Premiere Pro CS4. Karle Soule gives some of the details in Premiere Pro 4.1! Online Help will be updated with information about the new compatibilities on the day the update is distributed.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 12:17 PM | Permalink

QE Manager, Aurobinda Datta gives this handy method of testing alpha channel support for Adobe Media Encoder:

If you select to export at 32 bit color depth, QT and WMV (with the codecs selected below) AME will write out an alpha channel by default (There is no user input needed here).

How to verify that it works:
1. In Premiere Pro create a DV sequence
2. Create a New Item> Bars and Tones with settings same as the DV sequence and then drag it to sequence.
3. Select clip and then from effect controls, scale it down (You would get black border all around which is Alpha)
4. Export to AVI (say alpha.avi) with bit depth 32 bit (codec = none)
5. Create a new dv sequence (say test) and then create a new item> Universal Counting Leader (UCL), and drag it to this sequence to video track1.
6. Import the alpha.avi file in Premiere and then drag it to sequence test and drag it to video track 2
7. Now you should see the UCL in the background and in the foreground you should see the bars and tones.
8. If you repeat step 4 with bit depth of 24 bit (no alpha), in step 7, you will not be able to see the UCL in the background (you would get black border)

32 bit color depth means 8 bits per channel multiplied by four channels.

Also a new Help topic, Exporting video files with alpha channels, is in the works, and will go live with the next update of English Help.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 4:28 PM | Permalink

Reading Kush's primer on H.264 pointed a spotlight at a gap in the documentation available for Premiere Pro and for Adobe Media Encoder: we haven't made much background material available about the various codecs and their various uses. With the explosive growth, in recent years, of the number of codecs, a central listing of resources explaining them would seem a welcome thing for users of Premiere Pro.

Can you recommend any online articles, white papers, primers, or tutorials expalning your favorite codecs? Send me their urls. I could add them to a codecs page in Premiere Pro Help, or link to them from the Premiere Pro Help and Support page, or blog about them, or all of the above.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Kush Amerasinghe has done a fine job of explaining the H.264 codec--covering some of the arcane settings in the Adobe Media Encoder along the way--in his primer H.264 for the rest of us.

And Jan Ozer has posted a good one too: Encoding options for H.264 video

Read these before exporting another sequence from Premiere Pro.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 10:33 AM | Permalink

Users of Premiere Elements unknowingly search Premiere Pro community Help for help with Premiere Elements. I imagine they walk away frustrated, because the products are quite different from one another, and the Help for the one is simply not meant to be used for the other. This is tragic, because Premiere Elements does have its own Premiere Elements 7 Help, its own Premiere Elements Community Help and Support page, and many resources aimed at its users. If you are looking for help with Premiere Elements, by all means, check out these resources.

Posted by Stephen Muratore at 10:20 AM | Permalink