At the big US video show NAB, Adobe have launched 5.5 version of their software including new versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder and Audition.  This is a year after the release of version 5 and means Adobe are moving to a developement cycle where they have a new ful version of the program (Premiere 5, 6 etc) every 2 years, and a .5 version every year.

So what's new in Premiere Pro 5.5?
There are some major enhancements as well as some minor ones. Here is a breif summary:
Edit in Audition - Audition has been totally remade and reworked for 5.5 and now we have a MAC and a PC version (previously Audition 3 was PC ONLY).  Audition should also replace Soundbooth in the Productiin Studio.  Adobe have also created a special link between Audition and Premieire Pro CS5.5 - you can edit your video in Premiere and then send the whole timeline, with the individual audio clips laid out as they are in Premiere to Audition for editing , and then send them back to Premiere as a final mix.
Adobe Story integration - Adobe Story is Adobe's script writing program, and you can use it to embed a script in to the "metadata" of a clip and to help with the speech analysis.  Adobe have enhanced this so you can now see the Adobe Story script related to the clip.
Drag clips into the program monitor to insert and overwrite - now if you drag a clip from the source to the program monitor a graphic appears to ask if you want to insert or overwrite.
Closed captioning - you can now attach a closed captioning file to sequences.
More CUDA accelerated effects - The Mercury Playback Engine was one big addition to Premiere Pro CS5 letting you do more in realtime with the right nVidia graphic card.  More effects are now realtime including: mismatched media (clips of different frame rates and sizes), time remapping, Interpret footage, aspect ratio changes, field order changes fast blur, invert, deinterlace abd remove flicker.
More graphic card support - the Neciry Playback Engine now supports the new nVidia 570 card as well as some Quadro laptop cards
Unified audio effects - ever been irritated with the 3 different types of audio effects - mono, stereo and 5.1 - so you had to choose the right effects based purely on which clip you were using on the timeline?   Well now all the audio effects are in one list! Effects which only apply to stereo clips - like fill left or fill right for example - simply cannot be applied to other types of clips.
Merged clips - if you have a video clip and several different audio clips in the project panel you can now "merge" these into one clip - great for people who record their sound separate to the video. You can merge up to 16 audio tracks with one video clip.
Final cut pro import/export enhancements - various bugs have been fixed and some thjings improved - for example Adobe have added export of the 3 way colour corrector with approximate settings.
 Added a search facility to keyboard customisation so you can commands more easily.
Adobe Media Encoder revamped - you can now drag and drop Premiere pro and After Effects sequences directly to media Encoder and you can set up a "watch folder" so any clips dragged into that folder will be encoded automatically.

If you want to read more visit the Adobe site:

Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5
Adobe Audition 5.5
Adobe After Effects 5.5
Adobe Media Encoder 5.5

As this was announced today some of the details on pricing are not yet available;  the Adobe shop lists an upgrade from Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 as £143+VAT and from previous versions of Premiere at £238+VAT.  As we are an Adobe VAR (Value Added Reseller) we will be selling at the same price or less.

When a new version is announced recent purchasers are normally elligable for a free upgrade but we do not know from when this will run.  We will post more details when available.

Will I need new drivers for my Matrox/Black Magic/AJA device?
Yes. All of these manufacturers will be working on these at the moment and hopefully they will be available by the time the product is released.  It is worth noting that if you have a Matrox RT.X2 or Axio then Matrox are probably not going to make drivers for CS5.5; they said when the CS5 drivers were released that they would not make drivers for future major released of Premiere Pro and 5.5 is a major release.

I have Premiere Pro CS5 should I upgrade?
CS5 works really well and if you do not need any of the above then do not upgrade.  If you have CS4 or before then CS5.5 just gives you even more reasons why you should update.

To read more about Adobe Premiere Pro and the rest of the Production Studio visit our website: http://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/Adobe_Premiere_Pro.html