Review: Red Giant PluralEyes 4

With Red Giant’s release of its Shooter Suite 13 comes version 4 of its oft-heralded syncing application PluralEyes. Maturing into version 4, PluralEyes has seen a number of improvements and enhancements from version 3. Upgrading is a no-brainer if you’ve become accustomed to the time-saving features found in PluralEyes. The hardest decision will be deciding which new feature is your favorite.

Native Premiere Pro Support

Let’s start by looking at the biggest standout feature in my opinion: fully integrated, native support for Adobe Premiere Pro. Please join me in a collective “FINALLY!” Yes, it’s true, now you can install PluralEyes 4 and find it under the Extensions menu item in Premiere Pro (Figure 1, below).

Figure 1. Accessing PluralEyes from within Premiere Pro. Click the image to see it at full size.

Now you can stay within Premiere Pro to sync up all of your video and audio without having to export an XML and import into an existing Premiere Pro project. Simply throw your media into a Premiere Pro sequence and let the PluralEyes extension work its magic. You’re left with a fully synced sequence, ready to edit.

Bouncing Between Premiere Pro and the Standalone App

If you need to bounce out to the native PluralEyes application, you can still accomplish this by launching the app independently or by clicking a button in the Premiere Pro extension. From here, you can get more detailed by renaming your tracks (Figure 2, below). This is especially useful if you have a large number of video or audio sources.

Figure 2. Editing track names in the PluralEyes standalone app. Click the image to see it at full size.

Plus, using the standalone app you can save your PluralEyes project to return to and edit later. You’ll notice in Figure 2 (above) that even the new color scheme of PluralEyes pays homage to Premiere Pro sharing a similar dark background with aqua accents.

ities that postproduction pros can get.