However, you cannot export closed captioning to an output file using only Premiere.
Premiere Pro CS5.5 now supports the import of closed-captioning files (in 608 format for analog TV, and in 708 format for digital TV). Furthermore, because of a law passed in October 2010, any television programming delivered online–even on a smartphone–must be accompanied by closed captioning.
Because many organizations–especially government agencies and organizations that accept public funds–are required to be compliant with the Section 508 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1993, closed captioning and transcripts are necessary for both offline and online video content.
But wouldn’t it be nice if Premiere Pro generated the proper HTML 5 code for you, or if it expanded on its Dynamic Link feature (which currently lets you share projects between Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects) to dump the code into Dreamweaver?Īlso new to Premiere Pro is captioning support, a welcome addition. You can create multiple Watch Folders and set each to output different file types, and once again you can set them up to encode whatever is saved there to your preferred output format. Similarly, Premiere Pro CS5.5 has an improved Watch Folder feature: You simply drag a folder to Media Encoder, and whenever you add something to that folder, the application begins rendering it, even if it’s in the background. Premiere and Media Encoder have new presets for outputting tablet-friendly video, as well. You can create customized presets in Media Encoder, too, so that once they’re queued up there, you can choose a preset for each sequence and click just one more button to begin processing. With this new version, however, you can drag sequences (video projects) from Premiere directly into Media Encoder to get them rolling, rather than using menu commands. You can’t instruct the Media Encoder application that ships with Premiere Pro to output multiple files at once, either. But Premiere Pro CS5.5 doesn’t support two of the most HTML 5-friendly video formats, WebM and Ogg as a result, if you’re using Premiere Pro as part of a Web workflow, you’ll either need to find other conversion tools or continue to fall back on Flash video output. Unfortunately, because Internet browsers–even the newest ones–vary wildly in their support for video types, Web designers who want to use HTML 5 in their layouts will have to embed code linking to multiple formats, the idea being that whichever browser you’re using will read through the code until it finds a format it likes. HTML 5 support is one of the biggest features that Adobe touts in Premiere Pro’s suite mate Dreamweaver CS5.5, and one of the most important HTML 5 elements is the use of a tag. Premiere Pro CS5.5 is also available by subscription for $39 per month based on a one-year plan, and it’s included in various editions of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5.)
(Pricing as of June 26, 2011, is $799 for the full version and $179 to upgrade from the CS5 version.
But the big story this year, for many people, is how to produce video for the ever-changing Web–and in that regard, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 still has some strides to make. Last year, Adobe’s introduction of GPU acceleration to its Premiere Pro video-editing application produced an incredible speedup of editing and rendering tasks, and no other video editor has since answered with any significant GPU-acceleration features of its own. Adobe Premiere Pro has moved up to CS5.5, adding new features and bolstering GPU acceleration.