Also new, are many new codecs to natively support all the latest DSLR video formats, which are becoming increasingly popular. No conversions necessary! You'll also find support for this and other CS5 products via CS Live, a new online support community.
As with the past several versions of Premiere, the stand-alone version is also bundled with Adobe Encore, which is a great DVD/Blu-Ray authoring program (that integrates well with Photoshop for all your menu creation), and Adobe On Location, which can essentially help you turn a laptop into a field monitor, and allows you to record directly to your hard-drive.
Author DVD and Blu-Ray discs in Encore.
Ease of Use
Premiere CS5 is a complex program, that's for sure, and for a new user, it could all be a bit overwhelming at first, but the basics are pretty easy to pickup… while some of the more advanced features could take you years before you even realize they're there.
Adobe does make getting started a bit easier than most programs with the addition of a "Media Browser" so you can simply drag and drop video clips from a location on your computer directly into your bin.
Just drag and drop clips you need from the Media Browser.
From there, you have your timeline where you can visualize your cuts, and source and sequence monitors for previewing a source clip or your cut program respectively.
Of course this is meant for the professional, not people uploading grainy cell phone videos to youtube, and it should be old hat for any users of previous versions of Premiere. Final Cut users will pick it up very quick as well, as it's very similar. Even the tool set looks strangely familiar to that "other" program. Incidentally, if you're like me and happen to bounce back and forth between Final Cut and Premiere from time to time, Premiere CS5 allows you to import a Final Cut XML file.
