Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium Feature Tour Overview

[ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE 5.5 PRODUCTION PREMIUM] Hi, I'm Jason Levine, worldwide product evangelist for Adobe's video tools. In Creative Suite 5 we delivered breakthrough performance and truly raised the bar for nonlinear editing applications with the introduction of the 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro. With innovations like the revolutionary Roto Brush, we allowed motion graphic artists to rotoscope painstakingly difficult compositions in a fraction of the time. And with our open workflows and industry-leading truly native file-based format support, we allowed seamless collaboration with other nonlinear editors via AAF and XML exchange. Well, I'm happy to say that in 5.5 it's all gotten better. So let's take a look at some of the exciting new features in Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium. [A Smoother Editing Workflow with Dual-System Sound Support in Adobe Premium Pro CS5.5] If you're filming movies, television commercials, really anything professional, more common than not is that you're going to use a secondary source to capture your audio. And that's simply because the audio that's captured on your camera really isn't high quality enough, especially if you're capturing on something like a phone. So this is known as a dual-system sound workflow where you have the audio on the camera present, but that's really just there for reference, and then later in post, you'll synchronize the externally captured audio with the camera audio. So again, you could use a number of different devices. Zoom makes them, Taskem makes them. They're very easy to access. And the idea is that previously in Premiere, it was a very long, painstaking process to synchronize all of this together. With our new native dual-system sound support and the Merge Clips feature, you can do this very quickly, and in some cases you can even do it in a single click. So let's take a look. What we have here is our video, and you can see that we have some 1080p content. This happens to be from a Canon XF, which is also a newly supported native file format in Premiere Pro CS5.5. And below it we have two channels of audio which were captured separately on external devices. And if we just play a moment of this... [movie dialogue] You fail because you're trying to control the elements with your body. ...you can very easily see that it's not in sync with the video. So what I've gone ahead and done is I went and added clip markers to all of these different clips and tried to find the exact sync point here, for instance, where we had that clapper board so that I can simply drag these together to synchronize them. So that's really the first step. I can take the secondary audio, click and drag, snap it to those markers, and now when I play this back... [movie dialogue] You fail because you're trying to control the elements with your body. ...you can see that everything is in sync. But there is a problem here because now I'm effectively working with four layers at a time, which means I have to cut between four layers. I have to move these around. And if I have lots of additional content that I want to use, this can get very confusing, very daunting, very difficult to work with. So with the new Merge Clips command, I can literally take these tracks, select them all, choose Merge Clips, click OK, and now what you'll see inside the Project panel is that it has created one single file which houses the dual-system sound and the camera video and everything together in one--one single clip. A new feature in Premiere Pro CS5.5 is that from within the Project panel I can simply right click and choose New Sequence From Clip, which will take that merge clip, place it into a new sequence for me with everything in sync. Brilliant, simple, easy. But I still had to add those markers and manually synchronize that together. Surely if I had timecode in my video or if I had timecode embedded in my audio files, couldn't I just use timecode for sync? In fact, yes, you can. So if I twirl down here, you'll see that we actually have similar audio clips, all of which have timecode embedded in them. So directly from the Project panel, if I have the associated audio and the video files that go together, I can simply select them, right click, once again choose Merge Clips, and now I can choose to synchronize via in point, out point, or timecode, click OK, and once again it creates the single file for me that now I can edit from. And if I've got timecode there, I don't have to do any manual synchronization at all. It happens automatically. So anybody working in broadcast or working in film, this is ideal because it means that you can do this very, very quickly. A great new feature of Premiere Pro CS5.5 is the ability to work seamlessly with other nonlinear editing applications. So we've redesigned the keyboard shortcut interface to make it easier to use the same keyboard shortcuts that you were previously familiar with in Final Cut or Avid. If we go up to the Edit menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts, you can see now that we have proper shortcuts for Avid Media Composer 5 and Final Cut Pro 7. So if I would actually want to modify this keyboard shortcut, I can select it, Edit, and let's do something like Control S. And right away this tells me that Control S was already in use by this other application. So again, I can change it to something else, but it gives me instant feedback, making it very easy to customize these keyboard shortcuts. One of the other things that we've done, taking a play from our other nonlinear editing application friends, is some of their workflows-- in other words, the ability to take a clip that you've been working on in the Source monitor and simply drag and drop it into the Program monitor and insert or overwrite into your timeline. This is something that we didn't offer before, and now in Premiere Pro CS5.5 you can do this and it works wonderfully. So I can set my current time indicator to the place where I want to insert my content. I can set in and out points here inside the Source monitor and then very quickly I can simply click and drag into the Program monitor, and you can see that it says, "Drop to overwrite," or "Control to insert." And you'll notice that we actually changed the wording here. What is overwrite we used to refer to as overlay. Overwrite is now more standard. We changed it to overwrite. You can click and overwrite, drop your content into the sequence, and work just as you always have and use the same shortcuts that you were familiar with from those other applications. [Greater Performance Gains with the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5] The 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro allows you to do incredible things with HD content, even mixed media. Different frame rates, different frame sizes, different formats can all live natively inside a single sequence. And with the power of Mercury and GPU, you can play these back in real time, you can add effects in real time, and you can do more than ever in real time in Premiere Pro CS5.5. So in this sequence that we have here, you can see that we have six basic layers of HD. And if I simply right click here and go into our Reveal in Project, this will first show you that our first piece of content is 960x540. If I go to the next one here--let's take a look at this-- we can see that this one is 1920x1080 at 23.976 and then another clip here which is at a different frame size, 1280x720. So right away three different frame sizes and at different frame rates all existing together. And if I simply start playback on this sequence and I hit the tilde key to go full screen-- again, one of the capabilities of Mercury is that playback never stops-- you can see that brilliantly, beautifully, it all plays wonderfully in real time--all six layers. But actually, as we dive down deeper, you can see that Video 1 is actually labeled composite. This is a nested sequence. So if we double click on that, that brings open another sequence which actually now showcases three additional layers of HD. If I select the first one, what you can see is that we actually have our Ultra Keyer applied here. So we've got some real-time keying happening as well as some real-time eight-point garbage matte. And if I show you what's happening here, you can see that the matte is actually animated over time. So we've got real-time keying, real-time garbage matte happening, and additional layers of HD content. All of that is playing in that first sequence together. But as we look at Video 1 again, we can again see that we have yet another nested sequence which houses three more layers of HD content at different frame sizes, different frame rates, and also with effects like the fast color corrector and the four-point garbage matte. So what we really have are ten layers of HD with real-time effects all playing brilliantly, all playing full screen, and playback never stops. How are we doing this? The Mercury Playback Engine actually has two methods. It has a software method which doesn't leverage any GPU, but it also can leverage the GPU on supported Nvidia cards. And I'm happy to tell you that in 5.5 we've added support for more than a dozen new Nvidia cards, including cards on laptops. Yes. So now not only can you take advantage of the 64-bit power of Mercury by itself, you can also use it in conjunction with an Nvidia card to get even better playback performance, faster render times, and typically do everything in a render-free environment. One other element of this is that we've also accelerated additional effects inside Premiere Pro CS5.5. So things like directional blur, fast blur, and our new film dissolve effect-- all of these are GPU accelerated, which means that you're just going to get incredible performance on this content the moment you drop it on. We can play this back. Let's go full screen. Here's our dissolve. Brilliant, beautiful, simple, easy. Also new in Premiere Pro CS5.5 and yet another thing that's taking advantage of the advanced Mercury Playback Engine is the new RED R3D Source Settings panel. You can see that it's been slightly reskinned, we give you access to curves, and we allow you to work natively with RMD files, and you can either reload or save to new RMD files directly from this Source Settings panel. These RMD files contain nondestructive color information which can also be added and manipulated inside REDCine-X. So anything that you've done in REDCine-X can also be leveraged here. All the information is nondestructive. You can apply it directly to your clips. You can see that we can even reload from an RMD or go back to the default look of this. Again, we've got complete control over the curves, just like this. We can draw our own, we can create presets, and then when we're done, we can click OK, bringing this back into Premiere Pro. And because this is just metadata, because it's very much like camera RAW, it doesn't put any additional strain on the CPU. You can continue to play this footage 2K, 3K, 4K, seamlessly, brilliantly, and very easily. We also allow you to reload color information from RMD files. You can reload or even save to RMD. RMD stands for RED metadata, and this contains all of the color information, all of the settings that you see here in a sidecar file. This same RMD can also be leveraged in REDCine-X. So whatever you're creating in REDCine-X can be leveraged here, you can apply it. You can see that we can reload from the RMD, we can draw our own curves, or we can go back to the Default view, click OK. The RMD information is applied to the clip, but of course it's all nondestructive. And because it's just metadata, it doesn't put any additional strain on the CPU during playback or decoding. [Improved 64-Bit Adobe Media Encoder in Premiere Pro CS5.5] The newly enhanced 64-bit Adobe Media Encoder-- it's easier than ever before to simply take your projects directly from the Premiere Pro timeline or even After Effects and render them in the background, use new presets to go out to mobile devices and tablet devices, and even create watch folders to do true background batch processing. Let's take a look at how we do that. What you can see inside Premiere Pro is that we finished up our dialogue sequence and now we're ready to export this. So now it's easier than ever before to simply drag and drop directly from the Premiere Pro interface into Adobe Media Encoder and begin the process of encoding. So I can grab my sequence, Dialogue Sequence Final, click, drag, drop, and there we are, and we're ready to begin the process of encoding. Of course we can choose Formats, and this is really going to showcase all of the native formats that we have in Premiere Pro, everything from H.264, DPX, AVC-Intra, P2 Movies, etc. Choose Presets and choose the output and begin the process of encoding. You'll notice that the interface has also been reskinned. Its much cleaner, it's much easier to follow. And if we twirl up the Current Encode option here, now we can actually see that it's almost done encoding the content. But it gets even better because I mentioned earlier, what if we actually want to take this piece of content once it's finished and actually export it out to multiple different types of media? For instance, we want to send it not only to the big screen, not only to Blu-ray, but what about devices, tablets, mobile devices? We can do that with our new watch folder support. Let's go ahead and twirl this up, and we're going to click on the Plus button here, and we're going to create a new folder and we'll just place it on the desktop, and I'll call this Tablet Exports, OK. So once we have that in there, now we can choose a format. If we go up to Preset, right there you can see iPhones, iPods, iPads, and of course you can customize all of the settings for these very easily. So let's make one for an iPad. I want to create multiple versions at one time. I want to be able to leverage this like true background batch processing. So we can do that now with our watch folders. We can simply add that same watch folder multiple times, choose a different format, so why don't we go into something like F4V, and again, lots of different phone and tablet presets here. These are all new. Lastly, let's go to something like our H.264 Blu-ray. We can just match the source attributes here. It already has the output set. So now we can take that export that we just created, drop it into this single watch folder, and in the background-- thanks to 64-bit--it will create versions automatically of all of these different formats that we've just selected. [Experience an Integrated Audio-For-Video Workflow] With Adobe Audition CS5.5 making its way back into the suite and now available on both Mac and Windows, you now have more power, more flexibility, and incredible control over your audio inside your Premiere Pro sequences. So what we have here is we've been working on this scene, and we want to effectively send all of this content to Audition so we can begin leveraging some of its incredible editing tools, mastering tools, and noise reduction capabilities, maybe even add some music and do some additional things, and then send it all back to Premiere. So we have a new method of doing this. It's very simple, and I'm going to show you how we can literally drag select all the clips in Premiere, send it all to Audition, work on it, and send it back very fluidly. So from within the Premiere interface, I'm going to select all of my clips, go up to the Edit menu, and choose Edit in Audition, Sequence. When you do that, it's going to bring up this dialog, and you can see that we have lots of different options here, whether we want to do the entire sequence or the work area. We're going to export a preview video, so this is going to take all of the video content inside the sequence and effectively create one single compiled video track that you can use for reference inside the Audition interface. You then have the ability to Render Audio Clip Effects, Send Clip Volume Keyframe Metadata, and then of course open this entire thing in Audition. I've already gone ahead and done that for you. So if we bounce over to Audition, now you can see that the same project with the same track names and the same individual audio clips live inside Audition's interface. [movie dialogue] I can't do this! Well, you can, in fact. What we want to do is begin tweaking some of the dialogue here and, as I mentioned, maybe adding some music. Audition has lots of power and incredible flexibility, and we have two unique views when working inside of Audition-- the Multitrack view and the Waveform view. If we want to individually process files, we can tackle that by going into the Waveform view. It's as simple as taking one of these clips, double clicking on it, and it'll bring you into the Waveform Editor here. So if we wanted to make a very simple change like just increase the overall volume, we can use our on-clip volume controls like this, increase the volume, and the change is applied. We can go back to our Multitrack and we can begin rebalancing some of these changes. We can do this to multiple clips. We can even batch process these clips. But we'll save that for later. The other thing that I want to do here before I send it back to Premiere Pro is actually add some music so I have the reference of music to watch inside Premiere Pro's interface. So if I scroll down, you can see that I have some music selected here. I can drop this into a new track. We can play this back. [♪♪] So if we need to make some very simple changes to this, we can go into our Mixer. You can see that on our music track here, I can just drop the audio volume down a bit. [♪♪] [movie dialogue playing] Okay. That's at a pretty good level. At this point I'm ready to send all this back to Premiere Pro. So if I bounce over to Premiere, the first thing I need to do is actually select a blank sequence which actually has a video reference already present. From here I can then go over to Audition, we can go up to Multitrack, Export to Adobe Premiere Pro, and here's where we have a whole series of options of how we want this audio, this new audio, to reappear inside the interface. We can either export each track as a stem, or we have the option to mixdown the session to mono files, stereo files, or a mixed 5.1, also known as an interleaved 5.1 file. Leveraging some of the power and the fast performance of Audition CS5.5, I'm actually going to export each track as a stem, and this means that all of those individual audio clips that live in a single track will now be one audio track that is the entire duration of the video clip. I'm going to choose Export each track as stem, open it in Premiere Pro, click Export. You can see we have the status monitoring there. And before I can even finish talking, it's done. It's exported a Multitrack session that was approximately one and half minutes long. Let's go ahead and insert it here. Done. That's it. It's all here. So fast. Bouncing takes time, doesn't it? Doesn't it usually take real time to bounce a one and a half minute song? Shouldn't it take one and a half minutes? No. That's the incredible speed of Audition CS5.5. So now that we have all of our audio content back in Premiere Pro, let's go scrub ahead and just listen to where we've added some of that music. [♪♪] [movie dialogue playing] Yes, you can. [Stabilize Shaky Footage with the Warp Stabilizer in After Effects CS5.5] With the popularity of DSLR cameras and the rise of mobile devices shooting incredible HD video, we're seeing more HD content everywhere. And that's great. But the issue is that most of the time, people who are shooting with those devices aren't using any kind of steady cam rig. They're not using dollies or tracks, and you end up with very shaky footage which can sometimes be less pleasing to the eye. Case in point, we have a shot here in After Effects which was shot handheld, no dolly, no tripod, nothing, and it's okay, but it's indeed a bit shaky. So let's take a look at this. I'll do a quick RAM preview here. Let's go full screen by hitting our tilde key. If we take a look at this footage, it's not bad, but, very clearly, it's handheld. And for someone like me, it's making me a bit uneasy. Stabilization and the ability to use stabilizers is not new to After Effects. The thing is, it's hard to do or it's been difficult to do, and you really needed to know what you were doing to make the footage look good. And just because you stabilized something didn't mean that everything was still in the frame and was pleasing to the eye. It took a lot of time and effort to make something stabilized and look good. Now with the new Warp Stabilization effect in After Effects CS5.5, I'm going to show you how we can take this handheld shaky footage and make it look like it was professionally shot with a dolly on a track and make it very pleasing to the eye. Let's go back here and let's go up to our Effects Controls panel. I'm simply going to enable the Warp Stabilizer. You can see that we have all different types of stabilization options here, one of them being Smooth Motion. This will look if there's actually any motion on the clip or no motion at all. We also have the ability to choose our method where we have position, scale, rotation, perspective, and subspace warp. Again, choosing the different types of methods here will give you different types of results. The great thing is I'm going to use defaults. I'm going to stick with the defaults to show you the power of this effect. One of the keys to doing successful stabilization is the cropping and framing. You can also see here that under the framing options we have the ability to stabilize, crop, and auto scale. If I just turn this back to 25% real quickly, this is automatically performing all three of these tasks. If I just have it stabilize only, this is what you would end up with. So you can see what I was talking about. This is great and it's stabilized, but somehow now we'd have to rescale this, we'd have to recrop. Now we can let the Warp Stabilizer do it for you. If we go ahead and choose Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale, let's re-RAM preview this, let's go back to 50%, let's go full screen, and now what was once shaky looks beautiful. It's fluid, it's steady, and we literally used defaults to perform all of this. Why is this feature so great? On top of all of that, if you are a DSLR shooter, you'll notice one particular feature here, Rolling Shutter Ripple. Rolling shutter is a very common artifact present in all DSLR cameras, and you can see that by default we have that set to automatic reduction. So if you're experiencing rolling shutter, give it a try. The effect will amaze you. This is great by itself, but as an editor, I'm probably going to be working in something like Premiere Pro. I'm working on a shot, and I actually want to stabilize that shot, so I want to be able to use the power of 64 bit between Premiere Pro and After Effects, stabilize the shot, and keep on working. And of course you can do all of that with Dynamic Link. So let's pop over to Premiere where I actually have a RED clip. See here we have an R3D clip. Go ahead and bring this into the Source monitor, and if I go ahead and play this back, you can see that this too is in fact handheld. So we're going to set a couple of in points and out points here, something like this. Set an in. Let's go about two seconds, two and a half, set an out. And then I can simply right click on the clip here, and using our new feature, New Sequence From Clip, build a new sequence based on the attributes of that RED clip directly, automatically, OK. So I clearly want to stabilize this shot. Now very easily I can simply right click on this and choose to Replace With After Effects Composition. It'll automatically build the After Effects comp for me. Again, we can put this down to around 25%. Let's go ahead and turn on our pixel aspect ratio. Now I can simply take the Warp Stabilizer effect, drop it over top of the clip, and you can see that now it begins analyzing in the background-- background processing. Yes. So while that continues to analyze, if I go back to Premiere Pro, now you can see inside the monitor in Premiere it's analyzing, which means that I can go to another timeline and I can still work. I can cut, I can play, I can edit, I can do anything leveraging Dynamic Link and leveraging the power of the Warp Stabilizer between After Effects and Premiere. [Create Soft-Focus Effects with the Camera Lens Blur Feature in After Effects CS5.5] Creating dramatic lens blur, defocusing, and depth of field effects is really easy, especially if you're wanting to create something like realistic bokeh. But of course it's very easy if you have a camera and a lens that actually does that. Well, with the new Camera Lens effect in After Effects CS5.5, we allow you to create very realistic lens blur, even with footage that was shot in perfect focus. So let's take a look at how we do that. But first I'm going to show you what this finished version looks like. So if we take a look here, what we have is our character, and you can see that the focus shifts from the foreground to the background and back again or background to foreground and back again where we start in focus on his face, the focus shifts to his hand, back to his face, and then we have this light ball that's illuminating and again starts in focus as the focus approaches his hand and then defocuses as we move back. This process is known as a rack focus, and I'm going to show you first how we can create the rack focus. The idea here is that we're going to modify the distance settings to create a realistic rack focus, and then afterwards we're going to create that photo realistic bokeh and evidence all those edge halos as it renders those out of focus points of light, reproducing the exact characteristics of real cameras and lighting conditions. So in order to do this, I'm going to first start by turning off the effect. Let's go ahead and turn off our Camera Lens Blur on both of these layers. And allow me just to scrub through this so that you can see in fact that this entire shot is in focus. It's not out of focus. So everything that you saw a moment ago was created in After Effects. So let's do the rack focus. To do that we have to add a blur map. We add the blur map so we can not only defocus the entire layer but we can actually reduce the depth of field effects directly in that single image. So what you can see here is that I actually have a blur map, and you can take a quick look at that. You can see if we just zoom back out here, the blur map being drawn on the hand. And if I go up to my BG layer and I turn on Camera Lens Blur, you can see that the blur map layer is set to layer number 4 BG Blur Map and we're using the Luminance channel here. And simply by adjusting the blur focal distance which currently is set to 0, and you can see the hand is in perfect focus, of I raise this now to 1, it shifts the focus to his face. Back to 0, focus shifts to his hand. We've just created a rack focus very easily. So now what we want to do now that we've created that rack focus, let's focus on adjusting the actual look of the light ball in his hand. And for this we obviously want the light ball to be in focus as the camera approaches the hand, and then when it defocuses and moves back to his face, we want to create those circles of confusion, that beautiful photo realistic bokeh which actually mimics the shape of the camera aperture. And all of this can be done with the Iris Property settings inside Camera Lens Blur. So let's go up to the light ball layer here. You can see that we've got this set. Let's go ahead and turn that on. And right away it'll start adding that effect. If we scrub through, you can see that now as the focus shifts back to his face, we begin defocusing on that light ball and we get these really beautiful shapes here. You can see it's using a hexagon. If I actually wanted to mimic something like an 85mm prime F1.8 wide open, it might actually be a bit more circular. So I can set this to something like Octagon, I can adjust the roundness, but the key here is by using one single part of this effect, the blur radius, I can very quickly adjust how that's going to look. So simply by adjusting that one parameter, the blur radius, we can create those beautiful circles of confusion, that photo realistic bokeh, and really change the look of this. And again, remember this was all entirely in focus. Brilliant stuff. The best part about this too is that the AE composition cameras can even use these same settings to get more realistic depth of field blur. [Control Light Intensity Falloff with the Light Falloff Effect in After Effects CS5.5] If you're compositing in After Effects or, more specifically, 3D compositing in After Effects, then using lights is most likely part of your everyday workflow. And what you can see here is that I have a basic 3D comp where we have a ground plane, and let's call that the stage for now, and we have three layers of numbers that are set at different distances apart. What I'm going to do is use a light, a point light, to illuminate them. So if I do a quick RAM preview on this, what you'll see is using the standard settings, that even as the light diminishes, the intensity even with the number 3, which is the furthest away, is the same. And that's fine. But perhaps I actually want to gradually reduce the light intensity as the objects get further away and actually change the look of this. The issue is I want it to mimic natural light, but natural light doesn't maintain a consistent intensity over an infinite distance. It decays or falls off. So now in After Effects CS5.5 we have new light falloff options which can really improve the look of working with lights in 3D space. So if I use this same layer, let's go up to our Layer menu here and go to Light Settings. And if I go up to Falloff, you'll see that we have two options. Immediately when I turn on the Smooth option, you can see that where we are in this comp, suddenly the number 3 is disappearing. That's because here the intensity is decreasing in a completely linear fashion starting and ending at specific distances in pixels. And this is great, but this isn't still truly mimicking natural lighting. If we want the real natural light effect, we're going to go under Falloff and choose Inverse Square Clamped. And now when we go ahead--let's go ahead and OK this RAM preview-- you can see that this truly mimics the natural characteristics of light. This will create more natural lighting for 3D scenes, although light layers can still provide infinitely steady illumination to 3D layers. And the best things about this is it allows you to create the falloff with the same light types, intensities, and shadow casting settings that you've already been using in After Effects. [Get Direct Integration with Adobe Story and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5] Adobe Story is our collaborative script writing application that not only allows you to create scripts directly, import scripts from other popular script writing applications, but the key here is that you can turn all of this rich information into metadata such as dialogue and scene elements and directly import those into Premiere Pro. Some of the new features that we have in Story itself are the ability to track and review script changes by element or coauthor and then selectively approve these changes. So if we go up to the View menu, you can see that we have a couple of new panels. Our Track Changes toolbar here, which will allow you to see who is contributing and making changes, and then you can choose in which elements you want to view those changes--Action, Scene Heading, Teacher, Paladin, etc-- and these of course are representing characters in different parts of the script. With the Comments panel, this will very easily allow you to see comments that have been made inside the script and by whom, and by selecting one of those, it'll shuttle you to that exact position directly inside the script. And then if we go to the History panel, this too will allow you to see all of the revisions that have been made. The cool thing about this is that you can actually generate script versions on demand automatically at the end of each writing session, and you can easily manage in production script changes, even set up email notifications for changes made inside the script. Once you've done all this, of course we want to bring this into Premiere Pro. Previously you had to go through another application to do that, to actually tie the script metadata to Premiere clips. No longer is that the case. So from within Story now, I can choose File, Export As, and you'll see that in this case we would choose the ASTX file, but we also have options for other script writing applications, even MS Excel and Text Documents and such. We choose the ASTX file format, bounce over to Premiere Pro, where now we have some clips that we actually want to tie this metadata to, tie the script information to. And then we're going to run our speech analysis process to make the process of editing these clips easier, faster, and more accurate. So with our clip selected, we can play a bit of this back. [movie dialogue] You fail because you are trying to control it... We've heard this clip before. Okay. So now I want to effectively tie that metadata directly to this clip. I happen to know that this is from Scene 1. So you'll see here that inside the Project panel I've already indicated that this clip refers to Scene Number 1. By selecting this clip, I can go up to the File menu and choose Adobe Story, Attach Script File, navigate to where I keep my scripts, choose the ASTX file, click Open, and now as I twirl down the embedded Story Script panel inside the Metadata panel, you can see that all the information is there. But it doesn't stop there because right now all of this information is just living inside the clip. It's not referencing anything. This is where speech analysis comes into play. Quite simply, we can click on our Analyze button here, which will pull up the Analyze Content dialog. Here we can choose the language that we're going to use, the quality, we're going to tell it to use the actual embedded Adobe Story script, it can identify different speakers, and once we run this process which will of course happen inside Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5 in the background leveraging all the 64-bit capabilities, we can then go to the finished version. And I have one of them here where not only does it now see the embedded Story script but now we can actually see the analysis text. And because it's searching, because it's referencing the script, the accuracy here is far greater than it's ever been before. So if we wind this clip back--let's go ahead and select it here, wind back-- watch the cursor as Paladin begins speaking. [movie dialogue] I can't do this! It brilliantly follows the speech, and now we can literally click on words, shuttle to different positions inside this clip, set in and out points, and edit against the script, streamlining our workflow faster and more efficiently than ever before, and we can do it directly from Story to Premiere Pro CS5.5. [What's New in Audition CS5.5] Adobe Audition CS5.5 is the ultimate recording, mixing, mastering, and editing application that also features a fast, flexible roundtrip workflow with Adobe Premiere Pro, including some other new features like our new high-performance audio playback engine, faster startup, more responsive playback and editing, and the ability to work concurrently on multiple files and sessions. Not to mention the ability to exchange projects with other NLEs and DAWs via OMF and FCP XML interchange really makes this application the complete audio package. And the best part is it's now also available on the Mac. So what you're seeing right now is this version on the Mac. I'm going to take you through some of the interface and some of the features inside Adobe Audition CS5.5. One of the core things in Audition is that we have a Waveform view and a Multitrack view. Currently we're in the Multitrack view, and you can see that we have all of our tracks laid out. We've got our Mute, Solo, and Record buttons. We can play a bit of this back for you, and you can see we have our video window displayed here. [movie dialogue playing] And of course you can navigate this interface very easily. The nice thing is, just like with Premiere, just like with After Effects, the Interface panels work exactly the same. You can also very easily resize tracks either individually or globally. You can also scan through the entire interface very quickly with this portion bar up at the top. You can switch over to your Mixer view, and if you wanted something like your Multitrack and your Mixer side by side, you can simply grab the panel, dock it here, and now you've got your Multitrack Mixer and effectively your Multitrack Editor living side by side, allowing me to make very quick, very easy changes. Let's move this back. When it comes time to actually mixing audio inside Audition and if we're taking audio from Premiere Pro, we follow several different methods. If we were coming directly from an editing environment and if we're a video editor, we might be thinking in terms of Clip Effects. Clip Effects literally are applied to individual clips. So if I wanted to add something like, let's say, a reverb to this voice here, I can twirl down here, choose Reverb, go into something like Studio Reverb. Let's go ahead and solo this voice track, this dialogue track, like this. Quick playback. [movie dialogue playing] You can see now that we've just added in real time a reverb to simply only that clip. If we wanted to apply a reverb to all the tracks, to all of the vocal clips, to all of the dialogue clips in this track, we would then go to Track Effects. And this more commonly follows the way that most DAWs, digital audio workstations, work. So you've got two different methods of how you actually apply effects, again, making it very easy no matter what environment you're coming from. Similarly, if we wanted to actually start editing this, we can nondestructively edit in the Multitrack view. Remember that Audition has two editing methods. When you're working in the Multitrack, we're doing everything nondestructively. But if we want to destructively apply processes and filters or something like noise reduction to a clip, we can double click on it, bringing it into the Waveform view, and now any process that we apply is actually destructive. We're actually changing the original file. And of course we can save copies if we want to. Just to show you a little bit, we have the portion bar at the top here so that we can navigate through the interface. You'll notice that we have things like fade handles so that we can fade the ins and the outs of the file. This is just quick access to common everyday tasks for your audio clips, and you'll see that it'll actually redraw the waveform as we make these changes. There's your fade in, there's your fade out. You've also got your on-clip volume so we can visually readjust the volume here. And again, you've got the ability to add your effects and so on and so forth. Now, if we take a listen to this dialogue clip... [movie dialogue playing] ...we can hear that there's lots of noise on this. This is where I might want to use and leverage some of the noise reduction filters in Audition. This is really one of its biggest strengths, and it's very easy to do. We can do it sort of in the traditional way where we try and find a piece of noise, maybe something like this, and we highlight it, and from there we take a sample. You can see Capture Noise Print available in the right click contextual menu. However, we have something called the Spectral Frequency Display. The Spectral Frequency Display allows you to see frequency over time where we have frequency along our Y vertical axis and time along the X. And now as we actually zoom in, we can very clearly see-- Well, in these sections down here, clearly this is where people are talking. And where he is paused you can see nothing, just dead space. So what this enables us to do is actually see where the noise lives so that we can selectively and very accurately choose just the sections that are noise only to get the best profile so that we can denoise these files. This has been one of the core competencies of Audition for years, it still exists, and again, it's now on the Mac. So I can make a selection. You'll also notice that I'm using Photoshop style tools. We have our Lasso selection tool, Paintbrush, Spot Healing Brush, and the Marquee. For this example I'll use the Marquee. I can make a selection like this, right click, Capture Noise Print, go up to our Effects menu, Noise Reduction Process, and now I can begin previewing my noise reduction. The first thing I'll typically do is select the entire file, and then I can adjust my noise reduction sliders here to a specific amount--let's use about 80% reduction-- go ahead and twirl down to Advanced where you'll see we have all different types of settings. I'm going to set this one to around 0, click Apply. You'll see that it processes very, very quickly-- again, one of the new features of Audition CS5.5. And now when we play this clip back... [movie dialogue playing] ...the noise is virtually removed. Remember, what you're seeing here, color equals amplitude. So here's the before with the noise, and you can see all of these bright red amber areas. That's indicating that there's lots of noise on this clip. If we go ahead and redo the noise reduction, now you can see that they're virtually black. So the way that this works is the brighter the color or the closer the color is to yellow or white, the louder the amplitude at that particular frequency. So this is all dialogue hovering around 1K to 2K. It's bright, it's amber, it's loud. The noise, though, is all that purple red stuff living in this range here, 2K to 10K. Previously it was red and purple. Now it's black. The closer it is to black means it's quieter, it's softer. So visually, we're able to use Photoshop style tools to remove noise very effectively and accurately. And you can work this way with applying any kind of effect, not just noise reduction. But if you're mastering, if you're wanting to use any one of our numerous compressors or limiters, one of my favorites happens to be the Multiband Compressor. You can choose this. You can actually make a selection in the frequency space and only apply the compressor to those select areas very simply. And also, if you wanted to do something like a healing spot-- let's say that you had a click or a pop-- just like the Healing Brush in Photoshop, we can take the Spot Healing Brush here, we can adjust our brush size--let's size it down to around 15 or maybe even 11. And if we don't like this little piece right here, we can simply select it, [makes whooshing noise], it processes, and it's gone, just like in Photoshop. We're using our eyes to do noise reduction, effects processing, all kinds of processes very, very easily. So once again, this is just some of the things that you can do inside the editor. You'll also notice that you have a portion bar here so that you can visually see the Waveform view and the Spectral Frequency Display simultaneously. One of the other things that I love about Audition are the diagnostics. It's often been referred to as the After Effects of audio. And the reason for that is that you have so many different ways to look at and analyze the audio in your clips. One of my favorite things is the Frequency Analysis panel, which is now also supported in Multitrack as well. This happens to be a mono file, so if we play this back... [movie dialogue playing] ...you can see that we're getting a real-time analysis of all of the active frequencies, of the amplitude of the frequencies, in this Frequency Analysis panel. This can be very useful if you're trying to track down hum or other kinds of consistent noises that are resonating throughout the entire audio file. But probably my favorite panel and the one that I use on every audio file that I process is this one here, Amplitude Statistics, because quite simply, this is going to tell you everything that you need to know about your audio file, including Peak Amplitude, Sample Values, Clipped Samples, the actual Bit Depth, the Dynamic Range, and the RMS Amplitude, or more commonly referred to as the loudness, right? How loud is this? How do we perceive this file? So this is really all the stuff that you need if you're delivering files for broadcast, if you're delivering files for DVD. You need to know these things. And in a single click you can access all of those settings very easily and make any associated changes. When you're working in a video environment, very commonly you might be denoising or processing or using any one of our many filters. We also even have surround reverb because remember, you can also process and record and mix in 5.1 surround and send that media to Premiere Pro. But if you have lots of files like the ones that we see in our Multitrack here, it's quite common that you might want to process all of them with the same effects or the same filters or the same noise reduction. And you can do that leveraging batch processing. Batch processing on lots of files can often take a lot of time. One of the things that we've done with our new optimized engine inside of Audition is we allow you to batch process. You'll actually see the status of the files processing, but you can keep on working, and you can work on other sessions while it's doing that. So let's go ahead and actually do that. We're going to go up to our Edit menu and choose Batch Process. And now, just like you've seen in the other applications in Production Premium, I can simply take a series of audio files--and let's grab some of these here, some of these CLF audio files. Let's grab a whole bunch of them and drag and drop them into the batch processor. Okay. We've got dozens of them. Great. So now we can go into Batch Process, we can Apply a Favorite, and you'll see that under Favorites we have lots of presets. This is pointing to a lot of common processes--De-Essing so if you have a lot of dialogue that's very sibilant, this preset here, this favorite, will take care of that. Fade In, Fade Out, Hard Limiting, Normalizing, Removing DC Offset or 60 Cycle Hum or 50 Cycle Hum if you're in other parts of the world. You can use and create these favorites to process all of these files simultaneously. So let's just go ahead and normalize all of these to, say, -3. You can choose a file name prefix if so desired or just keep the file names the same. You choose the location where you want them to go. You can choose the format, and we'll keep these at Windows PCM wav. You'll see you also have the options for AIFF, MP3, and QuickTime. Choose the format. In this case we'll leave it Uncompressed, 32-bit Floating Point. 32-bit Floating Point is in fact the native file format for Audition. So no matter what you bring in, it's always processing in 32-bit Floating Point-- much like Premiere. Let's go ahead and click OK, and it starts processing. You can see that it's so fast it's done. I don't even have time to go to the other sessions. That's how quickly the batch processor works. The key here is that you can continue to batch process and work in the background. And you'll see of course we have multiple sessions open. So if I want to start working on my trailer session, I can pull my video window back up here, scrub through this. Let's play it. We can go to our 5.1 session, so here we're building out an actual 5.1 multichannel session. We're going to create an interleaved multichannel file which we can then leverage in Premiere Pro. You can see it here, and you can see our multichannel metering down below. [movie dialogue playing] But what if we actually want to take all of this and use this in another DAW or use this in another editor? Or perhaps we want to bring in content from another DAW or editor. We can do that, as mentioned earlier, via OMF and FCP XML interchange. So right here if we go under the Export menu, you'll see that you have the options to export multitrack mixdown, the session, FCP XML interchange, or OMF. So whether you're on the Mac or the PC, if you're looking for a powerhouse audio application that will allow you to record, to mix, to master for CD or Blu-ray, to master for the Web, to master your audio for mobile devices, or to take your session files from other editors or other DAWs or Premiere Pro and fix and master and clean up and restore audio and send it back, you can do all of that at Adobe Audition CS5.5. Whether you're on the Mac or the PC, it's all there, it's fast, it's powerful, and it will change the way you work with audio. 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