Content area
Full Text
this is a review of Adobe's Speech, to Text feature, which, is found in both Adobe Premiere Pro CS 4 and Soundbooth CS 4. I'm stating this upfront because somewhere along the line in the 4 months since I was commissioned to test and write about this new feature and when and I completed my review, I decided that I would be doing a disservice to my readers by spending the entire article discussing a feature that is just a bit ahead of its time, while ignoring one that has been around for a few versions but is finally fully functional.
More on the Speech to Text stuff in a bit.
THE MISSING LINK (UNTIL CS4)
In the 8 years I have been editing on Adobe Premiere and Premiere Pro, I've seen a lot of new features and improvements over seven different versions. Mind you, some of the versions were .5 and even a notable .51 version, but despite their fractional upgrade nomenclature, these half-steps have been some of the most significant upgrades, including Premiere 6.5, which introduced real-time previews, and Premiere Pro 1.51, which included HDV support. By far, the most exciting new feature with Adobe's latest NLE, Premiere Pro CS4, is the Dynamic Link functionality that allows the editor to send a Premiere timeline to Encore without first rendering to an intermediate or delivery codec.
Although once you send an initial sequence to Encore you cannot send additional sequences to Encore using the same Dynamic Link function to form additional timelines, I discovered that once an Encore project is created and remains open, Adobe now permits the drag and drop of actual Premiere Pro sequences straight into Encore! Although the time- savings benefit is attractive, being able to skip an intermediate codec improves the final encode quality while at the same time taking the guesswork out of bitrate calculations by allowing Encore to automatically select the optimal bitrate for the project.
And that isn't even the best part. Because Encore is linking to an active and editable Premiere Pro sequence, when you inevitably find that you need to make a small (or major) change to the original Premiere timeline (s), it automatically updates in Encore without any reexporting, relinking, or redoing anything other...