Adobe Premiere 6.5
by Douglas Dixon, Manifest Technology,
www.manifest-tech.com
What's New
Real-Time Preview
- Adobe Title Designer - MPEG
Export to DVD
Windows
Media and Web Integration - Audio
Processing
Premiere's Strengths - Video
Editing Products
Adobe Premiere has been the long-established leading video editing
application (www.adobe.com/premiere)
for Windows and Macintosh. For video professionals, and for others ready
to step up to a more professional tool, Premiere offers professional
features and a clean and robust interface for working on digital video
projects. In August 2002, Adobe shipped the latest version, Premiere
6.5, with features including real-time preview, a new Title Designer,
and support for MPEG-2 export and DVD authoring.
I had the pleasure of working with Adobe on the Premiere beta
program, and was impressed with the level of activity and enthusiasm
among the beta users. Premiere has always offered strong support for
third-party hardware and software, as well as integration for working
with within the Adobe digital video family (After Effects, Photoshop,
and Illustrator). Premiere 6.0, introduced in January 2001, added
support for DV and Web formats, and significantly enhanced the user
interface for both novice and professional users. And now version 6.5
updates Premiere to take advantage of recent developments in hardware
and software performance.
This new version 6.5 is a "point" release, refreshing
Premiere to the latest operating systems -- Microsoft Windows XP and
Macintosh OS X - and taking advantage of faster processing speeds with
features like real-time preview and MPEG encoding. This is not a total
rewrite to a major new "7.0" type of release, but instead is
an upgrade and enhancement to the existing product. For people already
familiar with Premiere, there are no gratuitous changes to the
interface. All the existing features still work the same as you are used
to; in fact the product ships with the old manual, plus an addendum that
describes the new features.
Premiere 6.5 on Mac OS X
Besides the expanded support for digital video devices and real-time
hardware, the 6.5 product includes the new Adobe Title Designer with
more than 90 Adobe PostScript fonts, plus support for import and export
in the new Windows Media 9 format, and exporting directly to MPEG format
for DVD authoring. The product also includes additional goodies such as
additional After Effects filters, audio processing tools from TC Works,
and updated Sonic Desktop SmartSound Quicktracks.
Perhaps the most visible addition to Premiere 6.5 is support for
software real-time preview. As the processing power of desktop and even
laptop systems has increased, it is now possible to preview your
timeline in software, without needing assistance from a hardware card.
You can see the visual effects of your edits immediately, including
transitions, effects, and titles, instead of needing to wait to render
each time you want to experiment with a change.
Premiere provides built-in presets with real-time preview enabled for
DV editing. On recent fast machines, you can enable it for all your
projects as well. Premiere scales the preview to take advantage of the
available system horsepower, and degrades quality and frame rate
gracefully on less powerful machines. With DV projects, you also can
view the preview through a FireWire / IEEE 1394 connection, and display
it on an external monitor.
However, the availability of real-time preview still does not mean
the end of rendering. When you output your final production, you still
need to have Premiere render the final output frames in order to
generate transitions and effects at full quality and to have the final
frames prepared for real-time output to DV or for Print to Video.
Adobe's posted system requirements for real-time preview are a G4
processor (G4 dual recommended) on Mac and a Pentium III 800MHz (Pentium
4 dual processors recommended) on Windows.
Premiere 6.0 included a simple Title editor for formatting text and
graphics with rolls and crawls. Version 6.5 adds the new Adobe Title
Designer, a much more sophisticated tool for broadcast-quality title
sequences that includes features similar to Adobe Illustrator and
InDesign. (The old Title editor is still available for compatibility
with old projects.)
The Title Designer includes high-quality text and drawing tools, plus
management of styles and properties, and transformations and animation.
Besides the basic text formatting options such as fonts, sizes, and
colors, it adds typographic controls such as kerning, leading, baseline
shift, slant, and rotation. You also can apply edge treatments such as
outlining, embossing, and bevels, and control transparency, drop
shadows, and gradients. You even can map a texture patterns onto text.
Adobe Title Designer
Besides the regular shapes such as rectangles and circles, the Title
Designer includes the Adobe-standard Pen tool for drawing free-form
vector shapes. And, text can follow a path that you draw.
To simplify your work, you can group shapes to manage them together.
Adobe provides hundreds of pre-defined text and object styles, or you
can create your own object styles and custom formatting to save and load
across different projects. A swatches palette provides a preview of the
appearance of each style.
Finally, to animate your titles, the Title Designer provides built-in
roll (vertical) and crawl (horizontal) motions, with control of the
duration and speed. You also can apply more sophisticated motion
effects, with keyframes, in the Timeline.
To get you started even faster, the Title Designer includes more than
170 professional template designs, including rolls and crawls. You can
preview the templates to pick a good match for your project, and then
modify and it for a custom look.
With the exploding interest in desktop DVD authoring, Premiere 6.5
now supports exporting directly in DVD-ready MPEG format, to use with
Mac and Windows DVD authoring tools. However, you should use MPEG only
for the final exported clips; although you can import compressed MPEG
clips into Premiere, but it's not a good idea to edit them because any
further processing or re-compression will cause visible degradation.
On Windows, Premiere includes the Adobe MPEG Encoder for exporting,
and Sonic DVDit! LE for DVD authoring. The MPEG Encoder, powered by Main
Concept (www.mainconcept.com),
includes presets to export to common DVD and Video CD formats, NTSC and
PAL, as well as advanced options to set encoding options down to the
subtlest detail. You then can import these files into the included Sonic
DVDit! LE (www.dvdit.com), and author
great-looking DVDs with interactive menus and custom titles and
graphics.
On Macintosh, Premiere interfaces with Apple's DVD Studio Pro (www.apple.com/dvdstudiopro).
If installed, DVD Studio Pro adds the QuickTime File Exporter module to
your system, so you can export to MPEG directly from Premiere. You can
then import the files into DVD Studio Pro, which can use chapter makers
set in the Premiere Timeline. Of course, you also can export files in DV
format to use with Apple's iDVD.
On Windows, Premiere 6.5 now both imports and exports Windows Media
format (www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia).
You can import Windows Media video footage and music tracks, and edit
them directly within Premiere. Previously, Windows Media was mostly a
write-only format for content delivery, but it is starting to be opened
up to be used more as a capture format for audio and video clips that
you then want to edit.
Because Microsoft released the latest version of Windows Media in
September 2002, after Adobe shipped Premiere, Adobe has posted a plug-in
update on its web site to support the Windows Media 9 (which you may
have heard as code-name Corona).
As before, on Windows, you also can export to Windows AVI files,
Apple QuickTime (www.apple.com/quicktime),
and to the Web using the RealMedia exporter (www.realnetworks.com).
On Macintosh, Premiere can export to usual QuickTime file formats and
compressors. In addition, with the QuickTime File Exporter module
installed (from DVD Studio Pro), you can access the same capabilities as
QuickTime Player Pro, with export to Windows AVI files, and extensive
control over exporting to QuickTime streaming formats.
The Premiere 6.5 product includes several new audio processing tools
from TC Works (www.tcworks.de), plus
additional SmartSound QuickTracks from Sonic Desktop (www.smartsound.com)
to automatically create music and audio effects.
On Windows, Premiere includes three Direct-X plug-ins from TC Works
to sweeten audio: Dynamics, EQ, and Reverb. These provide convenient
control-panel interfaces so you can experiment with audio clips as they
are playing, varying the effect dynamically in real time. You can use
the TC Dynamics effect to boost the sound quality of an audio track with
compression and expansion. Use TC EQ to equalize an audio track by
manipulating specific frequencies to highlight particular sounds or to
minimize noise. Use TC Reverb to add ambience to audio tracks by
simulating the acoustics of sound in different environments.
TC Works Dynamics
On Macintosh, Premiere includes TC Works SparkLE, a stand-alone
utility that provides real-time two-track audio processing and editing.
With SparkLE, you can play and edit high resolution sound files in a
variety of popular formats and without any additional audio hardware.
Premiere also includes 27 SmartSound QuickTracks from Sonic Desktop
to use to automatically create music and audio effects in a desired
style. You select a style and specific composition, and then SmartSound
Maestro will create a custom version to fit a specific duration in the
Timeline, with a smooth opening and ending. You can use these as openers
or as background pieces, with music and sound styles such as string
quartets, jazz, Motown, rock, techno, and new age.
Premiere's strength has been as a robust, reliable tool that provides
an efficient editing environment. For experienced editors, it provides
fast keyboard shortcuts and multiple editing modes. For newer users, it
provides simpler interface options such as the Storyboard and extensive
assistance from tooltips and the Help file.
For new users and professionals, the extensive Undo capability and
History Palette permit you to experiment without fear because you can
always back out your recent changes. And with the new real-time preview
makes experimenting even better, since you can preview your changes
instantly and quickly try out new options.
Premiere offers great flexibility in customizing the interface to
your editing style, and even the ability to save and reuse multiple
layouts. The Project Settings dialog provides an integrated view of your
current settings: capture, project, content, and output, as well as the
ability to save and reuse common settings. You can use the built-in
presets, or customize and save and reuse your own preferred settings.
Premiere also provides extensive hardware support for both video
hardware (especially DV cameras), and third-party capture cards and
accelerators. You can find Premiere bundled with a wide variety of
hardware boards, from FireWire / IEEE 1394 boards to capture and
accelerator products from companies like Matrox (www.matrox.com/video)
and Pinnacle (www.pinnaclesys.com).
These products can provide a single hardware solution for DV and analog
video capture and output. Some include a convenient break-out box with
connectors for DV, high-quality analog video capture, and analog video
output.
In addition, some of these products provide hardware acceleration for
common video editing functions, providing real-time preview of more
complex multi-track productions with several layers of transitions,
effects, and overlays. Again, these will accelerate previews to speed up
your workflow, but you will still need to render the final production
before exporting it.
Premiere also is a comfortable fit for people who are already working
with other Adobe digital media tools. Premiere offers tight integration
with After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. You can use Edit
Original to edit native Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects files,
and then, after saving the changes, Premiere instantly updates the
content in place. These tools also are available bundled as the Adobe
Digital Video Collection for professional digital video production.
The video editing market continues to develop rapidly. With Premiere
6.5, Adobe has stepped up Premiere to the current state of the industry.
Premiere is a robust and comfortable tool for digital video editing,
designed for enhancing your workflow when doing serious work. Premiere
6.5, full version for Mac or Windows is US$549 (MSP) and US$149 to
upgrade. You also can save money by purchasing the full version of
Premiere in a bundle with other Adobe tools, or bundled with hardware
cards. French, German and Japanese versions of Premiere were due to ship
within 90 days of the English release.
In comparison, the lower-end consumer tools, available for around
$100, are fun to get started with for simple productions. These include
Pinnacle Studio (www.pinnaclesys.com),
Roxio VideoWave 5 (www.roxio.com) and
Ulead VideoStudio (www.ulead.com/vs).
The consumer products evolve more rapidly, and are updated more often
with new technology, graduating from Web export to DV capture with scene
detection, MPEG export and native editing, integrated DVD authoring, and
even automated editing.
In the professional market, at around US$500 to $700, Ulead continues
to enhance MediaStudio Pro (www.ulead.com/msp),
and Pinnacle has introduced Edition with background rendering (www.pinnaclesys.com).
For more info about Adobe Premiere 6.5, visit the How
to Use Adobe Premiere 6.5 page at Manifest Tech.com
Buy Doug Dixon's
How to Use Adobe Premiere 6.5
book from Amazon
Buy Adobe Premiere from B&H Photo Video
Copyright 2002, Douglas
Dixon .
All Rights Reserved
Manifest Technology(R),
www.manifest-tech.com .
Manifest Technology is a registered trademark of Douglas Dixon
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