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.

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.

If I were to take a long-term view of the successive Creative Suite (CS) releases from San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems, I would equate them to a product created a bit further north in Napa Valley. As you may recall, for most Windows-based users, CS3 was a bit thin—Mac compatibility was the most prominent new feature. At some point, seemingly late in the game, it felt like Adobe measured the value of CS3 for Windows users, decided it was weak, and bought Serious Magic so it could throw OnLocation (then DV Rack) into the suite.

In contrast, CS4 was very robust and full-bodied. Not only did Adobe deliver AVCHD support, it also extended Dynamic Link from Premiere Pro to Encore, so you didn’t have to render between editing and authoring, which was a huge timesaver. Adobe also debuted Adobe Media Encoder, a competent and easy-to-use batch encoding utility. Throw in lots of smaller but highly useful improvements—such as multiple sequences with different parameters in Premiere Pro, one-to-many edits in Premiere Pro (i.e., the ability to apply one filter to multiple clips simultaneously), multitrack capability in Soundbooth, a new interface for OnLocation, and many others—and you had a true vintage release.

While in San Jose, Calif., recently for Streaming Media West, I called Adobe, which has its headquarters in San Jose, to ask I could swing by to discuss the next version of Adobe Creative Suite, or CSNext as it's been dubbed. Simon Hayhurst, Adobe's senior director of product management, was kind enough to spend an hour with Tim Siglin and me.

Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Suite 4 (CS4) is out and shipping in all its glory. You've probably heard lots about it. In this review, I'll pull the major points together and review CS4's new features within the workflow of a typical project, from preproduction planning to rendering and authoring. Click over to the article to get the story.