There was a time when semi-professional video editors and home-video enthusiasts had little choice but Adobe Premiere. Back then, video capture and output depended on proprietary hardware, which often only worked with its bundled software. But now the widespread support for FireWire and DV has left video enthusiasts free to use whatever editing tools they want. What’s more, two of Adobe’s biggest Premiere customers - Pinnacle and Canopus - have developed their own editing software. Premiere is now competing with Pinnacle Edition, Ulead MediaStudio Pro, Sony Vegas 4 and Avid Xpress DV. The market’s getting mean, so it’s about time Adobe gave Premiere a much-needed overhaul, and at first glance Premiere Pro seems to be just that.
So what’s new?
The most obvious change is the layout, with many of the floating palettes condensed and combined to streamline the interface. The main clip bin, for example, is now tabbed to provide access to video filters and transition effects, while the source monitor is tabbed to provide effects editing tools -- reminiscent of Apple’s Final Cut Pro. However, despite Adobe’s best efforts, it still feels cluttered on a single monitor.
Timeline editing has also changed. Premiere no longer supports A/B-roll editing, where the main video track is split in two with a transitions track between. Instead, transitions must be dropped between adjacent clips on a single track. It’s an approach common to most other editors, but it will be unfamiliar to long-time Premiere users. As with most editing programs, however, Premiere lets you add videos to the timeline in an ‘insert’ or 'overwrite' mode. The former is where video is added at the edit line, and everything after it is moved further down the timeline; the latter simply replaces any existing media. Slip and slide edit tools, meanwhile, are easily selected from a Photoshop-style tools palette, and the edit trimmer is a separate window that can be resized to dominate the monitor if need be.
Not only that, but a project can now support numerous nested edited sequences, and it's possible to immediately toggle from one to the other using tabs above the timeline. This is hugely important for anyone editing long-form projects, where scenes can be cut independently from one another and combined, arranged and rearranged in a whole new sequence. Hefty projects are simplified further with the ability to add numerous 'bins' to projects, where specific media files and sequences may be housed. You can step into bins with a double click or expand them into a tree structure, which may make editing big features a lot less daunting.
One area that hasn't been completely overhauled is titling. The titler is certainly well featured and enables good levels of control over the font, size, kerning and various shadow and border effects, but the interface lacks the immediacy of other titlers such as Pinnacle TitleDeko.
The FireWire direct-capture tools haven't changed much either, although there's now the added bonus of scene detection - dividing clips into smaller chunks according to changes in date and timestamp of the source tape. You can even instruct the capture window to navigate the tape, jumping scene by scene. Plus, logging clips by timecode enables unattended batch capture - you go off and have your dinner while the program controls the DV camcorder or deck, finds the required footage and brings it onto the system. This is nothing new, but while previous versions stored this logging information in a text-based batch list, Premiere Pro follows the lead of Edition and Avid Xpress DV by presenting the clips as offline files in the clip bin. These can even be added to the timeline, although they can't be viewed until they're captured.
Batch capture of offline media, meanwhile, is a simple process of highlighting the clips, right-clicking and selecting Batch Capture. It works relatively well in practice, and worked fine with a Panasonic DV2000 DV deck, until I introduced it to a recording made in long-play mode. Premiere was then unable to find the correct timecode points to begin capture, overshooting it back and forth several times before giving up.
It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only problem we had with Premiere Pro. It's fair to say that our review copy (in beta at the time of going to press), while close to the retail version, is still in need of some debugging. The accuracy of basic video editing was hampered greatly by jerky scrubbing on the timeline and poor responses when using the spacebar to start and stop playback. Premiere would stop playback some moments after the bar was struck, overshooting the cutting point we wanted to mark. Hopefully, these kinds of problems will be ironed out when the final version hits the streets.
The other problem to look out for is the system requirements. Adobe has now abandoned the Mac platform and made Premiere Pro Windows-only. More specifically, it’s Windows XP-only and extremely dependent on SSE instruction sets, to the point where it bluntly refused to run on an Athlon Thunderbird system, saying 'Adobe Premiere Pro cannot run on this computer because the processor does not support the SSE instruction set'. If you’re considering an upgrade, it will be worth asking yourself if you really want to change the OS or hardware of a stable editing system.
One big happy family
Anyway, back to the positive stuff. Premiere is a fine example of Adobe's new product integration strategy. At its best, this is demonstrated by Premiere's ability to import layered Photoshop image files as individual layers, which can be stacked up on the timeline and manipulated independently. While other editors (most notably Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress DV) have offered this for some time, Adobe's PSD support is still exemplary, keeping unrendered layer effects intact, where other editors would require them to be rasterised prior to import.
Where the competition still has one up on Premiere, however, is with the selection of transitions. Premiere contains a choice of fades, dissolves, wipes, 2D peels, flips and spins, but it’s still uninspiring compared to the toys provided by other programs, or even with realtime editing hardware. But this isn't the be-all and end-all. Many productions won't need to go beyond the most basic options of fades, dissolves and simple linear wipes.
The video filters are much more impressive, with effective tools for emulating lens distortion, as well as more stylised filters such as Posterise and Emboss. Most impressive is the new range of image-correction tools. There are now comprehensive level controls over red, green and blue channels, and the program's new colour-correction editor is excellent, providing an immense level of control over colour channels, hue, saturation, brightness and contrast. Subtle correction of white balance is also made possible by identifying different tones and hues as white, black or grey. The procedure also allows highlights and shadows to be crushed for effect, and the colour corrector lets you have a split-screen preview on the edit monitor (and on an external FireWire feed), providing a before and after view of effects before they’re applied.
Realtime previewing and effects
While version 6.5 provided realtime previewing of effects, titles and transitions, Premiere Pro offers realtime output via FireWire. It's a smart move, but it’s also dependent on the speed and power of your system. On a 2GHz Pentium 4 test machine with 512MB of RAM, even the most basic cross dissolves played back at a slightly reduced frame rate, and thin