Adobe CS4 Production Premium debuts a fantastic feature called Speech Search. There's a handy new utility in many of the applications in the bundle that allows you to search your video for specific text. It works wonderfully well if you're searching a particular key word in a sequence or if you're looking for a particular part of a single video clip. This is made possible with special software that analyzes the audio associated with the video clip and translates the audio to text. The text is then inserted into the video clip's metadata and is timecode-accurate.

This feature is a great enhancement for documentary filmmakers who have to sort through many hours of talking-head footage. The text is editable and, since it's metadata, it will be accessible in OnLocation, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore and Soundbooth. Naturally, it's really useful in Soundbooth, but we will get into that later.

The real power of Adobe CS4 Production Premium comes to life with the newest version of Adobe Dynamic Link. This utility makes it easier for the applications to work together seamlessly. Editors can work more easily between Premiere Pro and Encore. In earlier versions, it was a common task to render clips before moving; working with them in Encore. That obstacle has been removed, so that there's no more wasted time waiting on clips to render.

The interaction between Photoshop and After Effects now includes 3D capabilities. You can import Photoshop 3D objects into the After Effects application. This might not be practical for most editors, but it's a unique feature. Most 3D modelers and animators will likely prefer to work in a specialized 3D application. But, for some folks this could help spice up your After Effects compositions in many ways.

There are more improvements across applications when working through Dynamic Link. While we can't go into detail on all of them, it's important to note that this is an overall critical improvement that will aid professional editors tremendously. It's a relief to see that this suite is behaving more like a singular tool than ever before.

Adobe Encore (disc-authoring application) can now create Blu-ray Discs, provided you have a Blu-ray Disc burner. Encore CS4 also has added dual-layer capabilities that increase the encoding capacities with dual-layer DVDs and dual-layer Blu-ray Disc. Also, new to this application is a nice feature that allows you to export your DVD experiences as Flash files (.swf). In this way, Encore is becoming a more useful tool outside of DVD authoring.

As mentioned before, Encore now works even better with Premiere Pro, as you can drag sequences from your Premiere Pro project directly into Encore. Adobe has also enhanced the Flowchart to show your assets and how they relate to the media you're creating, another nice touch on the overall workflow.