What’s good

• Very comprehensive, lots of features, huge array of effects.
• Excellent audio editing - edit right down to the sample level, plus a comprehensive mixer, plug in support and 5.1 surround sound support.
• Third party support - including the Matrox RT.X card which greatly enhances the effects, as well asCineForm’s Prospect HD which extends the HDV support. Also a huge range of extra plug-ins are available.
• Integrates well with other Adobe applications - if you buy as the Production Studio then you can put After Effects compositions inside Premiere’s timeline. You can export chapter markers to Adobe Encore for DVD authoring and you can edit audio in Soundbooth and it is immediately updated in Premiere Pro.

Capture

On its own the software will capture using the FireWire port built into your computer. This allows you to capture either DV or HDV footage from most cameras. You can add analogue i/o by using an analogue to digital converter or by adding a card from Matrox, or Black Magic. The Black Magic cards really just add extra inputs and outputs where as the the Matrox cards also improve the performance of Premiere adding full quality realtime effects and add a lot more effects, particularly  better colour correction, better Chromakey and 3D effects.

To learn more about the Matrox cards click here.

To learn more about the different hardware available for Premiere Pro click here.

Formats supported by Premiere Pro

You can add lots of different formats to the Premiere timeline. With some footage Premiere will “conform” the audio - that is remake it from its original format into a new format that is easier to edit. This only happens with certain files, such a MPEG audio files, or files which don’t match the sound settings of your project.

To learn more about Premiere's HD editing click here.

Editing

Adobe Premiere Pro has an excellent editing interface - pretty intuitive and with lots of useful features built-in. It has really good trimming on the timeline as well as a specialist trim window. Because Premiere has been around so long this side of the program is really well thought out.

You can break your editing into several “sequences” or timelines and can even put one timeline inside another. This is an extremely useful feature for performing complex effects or breaking your edit into small chunks.

Effects

One area where Premiere excels is the range of effects - not just with the range of built-in effects, which is large, but also with the range of plug-ins available. We cannot list everything available so here is a sample:

• Colour adjustments - there are a whole host of filters for adjusting video levels and colour balance. Particularly useful are the levels filter which gives a histogram display not unlike Photoshop, the auto colour, auto contrast and auto level, which do as their names suggest with sliders to adjust their sensitivity, and shadow/highlight which allows you to bring out details in underexposed areas without distorting correctly exposed regions. With Premiere 2 several new colour correction filters have been added with decent colour wheels which also give you secondary colour correction - where you choose to adjust only a range of colours in the image instead of all the colour.
• Blur and sharpness effects.
• Distortion effects - lens distortion, corner pinning, spherize and more.
• GPU based page curls, refraction and ripple effects. These 3D effects use the power of your graphic card for most of the hard work and work in proper 3D - so you can ripple the image and as you turn it in 3D you see your flat plane has now become a 3 dimensional object.
• Keying filters - blue screen, chromakey, image matte, track matte, together with up to a 16 point keyframable garbage matte - so you can limit the area being superimposed and even make the area move across screen.
• Noise - filters for adding or removing noise.
• Lens flares, animatable gradients, cell or checkerboard patterns.
• Brush strokes - simulate a “painting style” on your image, write on - draw a path which gets revealed on screen over time, “texturize” a layer, leave colour - leave one colour on screen whilst making the rest black and white.
• Echo and posterize time.

All are controlled via the “effects control window”. With this window all the parameters to change the effects are instantly available - you don’t have to open new dialogue boxes. As this is based on the After Effects version it means that even if you adjust lots of different parameters, if you transfer your Premiere sequence into After Effects for more comprehensive tweaking, all the adjustments made in Premiere are carried over as well.

To learn more about Premiere Pro's range of effects click here.

Audio

Premiere has better audio editing than most programs.  It can edit down to the sample level, has a comprehensive mixer and can even make a proper surround sound mix. Click here to learn more about Premiere's audio capabilities.

DVD & Blu-ray writing

One of Premiere's greatest strengths is its DVD writing.  Premiere ships with Adobe Encore for DVD and blu-ray writing.  This is one of the best DVD programs available in our opinion, and one of the few that does proper Blu-ray discs with menus.  You can add chapters in Premiere and they appear in Encore.  Read more about Adobe Encore.

Integration with other applications

One of Premiere's greatest strengths is that it talks to other Adobe programs through the dynamic link.  You can just copy and paste a range of clips from Premiere to After Effects, then put the After Effects composition back on the timeline without rendering it.  You can put chapter markers on the timeline in Premiere and they will then appear in Encore.  You can export sounds straight off the timeline to Soundbooth, and as soon as you have saved the file in Soundbooth it gets updated in Premiere.  All this is possible if you buy the Adobe Production Studio, which includes Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Soundbooth, Photoshop extended, Illustrator, Ultra, On-location and Flash Pro. 

To learn more about the Production Studio click here.

Premiere vs the rest

Is Premiere the best program available?  The truth is that all the major programs have some good points and some bad points and none are the definitve program. 

Click here for a comparison of Adobe Premiere and Canopus Edius.