Here's a video I produced for OnlineVideo.net on using Premiere Pro's Ultra Key and Garbage Matte. It's an intro- to mid-level video that applies the effect on three videos of varying complexity. The good news? One video is of a (fully clothed) lovely dancing lady. The bad news? The lady's face is not showing (those pesky permission issues) and the other videos are of me.

All joking aside, if you've never used Premiere Pro's Ultra key and you plan to do so in the near term, the tutorial is worth a look.

Adobe announced today that it will have Creative Suite 5.5  ready for shipment by June 30. The retail price for the Production Premium suite is unchanged at $1,699, with upgrades from previous versions starting at $399. I wrote a quick news piece for StreamingMedia Magazine that you can read here, and interviewed two members of Adobe's product management staff in videos that you can on this site by clicking over to the main article.

I shoot pretty much exclusively in HD now, but often render to SD DVDs. When it comes to choosing a sequence preset for Premiere Pro, I have two options, native HDV, which is the format that I typically shoot in, or 720x480 widescreen to match my DVD output. Which is better? Well, the quality difference isn't significant, but it is noticeable, and using a 720x480 sequence and shrinking the HDV video to match produces better quality.

Today, Adobe revealed Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Like many members of the press, I've been working with beta software for about three months, and I am very familiar with the additions to Premiere Pro, OnLocation, Media Encoder, and a couple of ancillary programs, which I'll detail here. For information about After Effects, Photoshop, or other programs in the suite, you'll have to look elsewhere.

At a high level, the improvements to this corner of the suite concentrate in two areas: performance and metadata. Let's talk performance first. Since the Apple iPad shipped about two weeks ago, there's been a general surfeit of glowing adjectives on the Internet and in print, and we've all become somewhat immune to terms such as "amazing," "fantastic," and "astounding" (let's call it the "iPad effect"). So I'll be objective and descriptive, rather than literary.

Here's a screencam-based tutorial detailing and demonstrating the new performance related enhancements to Premiere Pro CS5 and identifying the relevant hardware requirements. Click the link to view the main article and the video.