The Speech Search feature in Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, and Flash allows you to find exact places in video clips via a text speech search.
Probably the biggest new feature for filmmakers is Speech Search. Essentially, Speech Search will process the dialogue in your clips and create an entire XMP text transcript which can be searched dynamically. This searching capability can be accessed in both Premiere Pro and Soundbooth, allowing you to quickly find clips that include certain words or clusters of words. While narrative filmmakers will find it easier to locate general takes using this feature, documentary filmmakers truly have a reason to rejoice, because finding that one clip where someone talked about his dog Julius will be simpler than it’s ever been before! Not only that, but once you have the transcript, it’s pretty easy to create subtitles for your film from it. Additionally, you can create flash video that’s actually searchable, so your internet viewers can skip right to sections of video that they’re looking for! Now, that’s sexy!
Content Aware Scaling allows you to stretch and pull images, while keeping certain elements in perspective, like the surfers in this picture.
Perhaps the second flashiest feature is one that got added at the last possible minute before the release of the Press beta copies. This super sexy new feature is called Content Aware Scaling (for Photoshop CS4). It’s designed for anyone who’s ever needed to get photos or other still assets into a different aspect ratio and/or perspective. (Think of squeezing a picture to make it a narrow column for a newspaper sidebar or stretching out a picture to make a web banner.) Basically, this feature analyzes the image in the background while you adjust it and intelligently recompose the scene to preserve the most visually interesting areas. Content-Aware Scaling automatically recognizes skin tones to keep people from being squeezed out of the shot, and for those who want fine-grained control, selection tools let you define the most important areas before you begin scaling.
There have been a number of improvements in Camera RAW technology in the new CS4 suite, which will allow you to non-destructively do many more things to RAW images. The picture here shows the creating of a dynamic vignette with a cropping window..
Now, while these are two of the flashier elements, let’s get into the streamlining features that are the meat and potatoes of this new release.
