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DVC Online Shopping > VIDEO EDITING > Adobe Premiere Pro


Premiere Pro 3

Adobe Premiere BoxAdobe Premiere is one of the longest established editing applications. It is now a very mature editing program, packed with features and with the largest range of effects and perhaps the best audio editing of any of the available editing programs.

It also has huge number of plug-ins available and hardware from other manufacturers which we can add to the system and will greatly enhance its abilities, and brilliant integration with the other programs of the Adobe Production Studio.

In these pages we have tried to give as much information as possible about Premiere Pro and its various options.

Premiere pro is part of the Adobe Production Studio. To find out more information click here.

If you are familiar with Premiere and are interested in what's new in Premiere Pro click here.

The main interface of Premiere Pro. The timeline has changed considerably since version 6, although very little since Premiere Pro 1. The only major change is the way you drag windows around on screen and the permanent audio meters. So if you are used to Premiere Pro 1 you will feel at home in version 3.

On the picture here we can see:

1. The project window - fairly similar to most project windows with a series of bin for you to catalogue your footage.

2. The source window- drag clips in here to set in and out points. You can also see any sound clips in a waveform mode - allowing you to see them very exactly or just choose to see the audio-waveform part of any clip and cut on that.

3. The destination window - this shows the edit on the timeline.

4. The timeline where you layout everything.

Information, history and effects windows - showing information on a clip, a history of past actions so you can jump back and undo the last 5 things you did if you want, and the effects window showing all the effects available. This list is huge, but thankfully you just enter the first few letter of the effect you want and all the effects with those letters appear - enter "time" for example and you see all your time based effects.

Audio meters - a small version of the full mixer not shown here, on screen permanently and the tools for trimming, selecting. chopping, adding keyframes, rate changes etc..

To learn more about the Premiere Pro interface click here.

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 as CineForm’s Aspect 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 Audition 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 Matrox RT.X card. The Matrox cards do more than just add Svideo and composite inputs and outputs as they let you do effects at full quality in standard definition in realtime, even to the FireWire, and add a lot more effects, particularly decent slow motion and 3D effects.

The RT.X2 and Axio cards also add realtime HD and HDV functionality.

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 HDV 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.
  • There is also a huge variety of transitions and wipes including some new 3D wipes. Premiere does not have a selection of wacky transitions like Avid Liquid’s Hollywood FX, or Canopus Edius Xplode which have strange effects like the video folding into an aeroplane and flying off screen, but all the commonly used effects are covered.

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 support in Premiere Pro

One area where Premiere Pro is significantly superior to most other editing applications is audio. Sony Vegas is arguable as good, but falls short on some editing features - Avid Liquid comes close for audio editing, although will not edit down to the sample level.

  • Surround Sound support - one of the few programs to support proper 5.1 surround sound - you can even position your audio in “surround soundspace”. Clips can be exported to Dolby Digital AC-3 sound for writing to DVD with your video, although you will need to buy an extra plug-in, approx. £200-£300 to make the AC-3 files.
  • Highly accurate sound mixing - you can adjust sound right down to the sample level, not just per frame as with most other programs. This also means you can place sound very accurately on the timeline.
  • Support for industry standard VST plug-ins - giving a huge range of filters on top of those supplied with the program.
  • Submix tracks allow you to route several tracks into one and then apply effects to this submix track.
  • Audio is displayed as left and right channels on the timeline - like Avid Liquid, and you can choose to break these out to mono clips, or just use the left or right channel.
  • You have control over the clip level and the track volume, which can be raised or lowered as desired. Plus you can write your audio levels as you listen to the audio.
  • Premiere has a “voice over tool” which allows you to record audio to the timeline whilst watching the video.
  • Premiere Pro draws “Pek” files of the audio when loaded. These give you an instant redraw of the on-screen wave form as you zoom in and out of the timeline - not more waiting for the screen to redraw like non-pro versions. It does this in the background while you work.
  • Support for ASIO sound cards means better and more responsive editing. The audio scrub is particularly nice.

To learn more about audio editing in Premiere Pro 3 click here.

Interface

All the programs in the Adobe Production Studio have the same style interface where as you grab the edge of one window and drag it decreases others.  None of the windows float anymore but are all interconnected.  They can be made to float as before if you prefer but the new arrangement means that you don't have wasted space, and hopefully means it is easier to work with the many windows of Premiere Pro. 

Lots of colour correction filters

Premiere Pro has loads of ways of improving your footage and correcting either bad exposrue or bad colour balance. We love Highelights and shadows for brighening up the mid tones or the shadows of the clip without ruining the bright areas - so a person against a window, for example, can be made into a decent shot without overbrightening the light areas. The fast colour corrector and the three way colour corrector give you one-click buttons to adjust colour on mid-tones, highlights and shadows, as well as one click adjustment of blacks and ones, as well as plenty of manual controls. They also have primary and secondary colour correction - so you can choose to adjust the colour on a selected range in the image rather than the entire image.

Premiere also still has Photoshop-style filters like levels where you can adjust the picture based on a histogram. It also has colour matching to you can just click on a few points in a two different images and get them colour in both to match.

Premiere also has a full set of scopes - waveform, vectorscope etc.

These all work in realtime on a standard def system, and in preview quality on an HD system. Add a Matrox card to your PC and you will get Matrox own variations of these filters which are slightly better (the Premiere ones are good, the Matrox ones are just better) and these are realtime with both DV and HDV footage. To learn more about Matrox cards click here.

 

Mulitcamera editing

Now Premiere users have a multi-camera feature to rival that found in Avid Liquid or Final Cut Pro.  It is very easy to use - simply put your different camera clips one above the other in a timeline and line them up.  This is my preferred method of lining up multi-camera clips anyway as on the timeline I can see both the picture and sound and can line up the clips very easily.  I can play all the clips together and hear if the sound of all clips is in sync or not as well.   You can also sync clips based on in or out point if you prefer.  Once you have synced the clips drop the sequence into a new one and select Mulitcamera enable and then, in the Mulitcamera monitor, you can see all your source cameras in one screen and next to it the playback of your chosen camera.  All screens play at once - different from Avid Liquid for example which only plays the source monitors at once.  Then you either click on the clip or use the numbers on your keyboard to switch between shots.  The multicamera's only drawbacks are that it can only handle up to 4 cameras (not a huge limitation for most people) and the playback of the multicamera's is on screen only.  However you can drag the multi camera monitor as large as you like so this is not a major problem.  I have to admit that of all the Mulitcamera plug-ins I have used I think this is the simplest.  The major problem is always making sure your shots are aligned in the first place and the Adobe version makes this easy.

Clip notes

Possibly one of the biggest things in Premiere Pro, which if collaborating with others will be a huge benefit.  You choose export as clip notes and can save a version of your timeline in an easy to email/ftp form (say as a low resolution Windows Media file) and then you send this off to someone who you would like to comment on your film.  They then open up the file in the latest version of the free Adobe Acrobat reader and can watch the movie and add comments, complete with their name tagged to them, at specific points through out the movie.  Then when finished they save out a small comment file which they email back to you.  You import this into your project and it is added to your sequence as a series of markers complete with comments.   So you can easily just jog through the markers and see at exactly the right points comments like "that jumper is too read", "that actor is too ugly" etc. It makes the process of sending videos off for approval and acting on the results as easy as possible and all it requires is that you have a copy of Premiere Pro 2 and your partner has a copy of Acrobat reader.  We can even foresee people buying a copy of Premiere Pro just for this ability even if their movie is made with another program!

Adobe Media Exporter

The Adobe Media Encoder is a great way to remake footage into formats for the web, DVD and Bluray. It has loads of options and presets for all the most popular formats, and shows you the quality you can expect before encoding as well as telling you useful information on how much large the resulting file will be etc..

Improved quality

Premiere renders at higher quality with 10-bit and16-bit colour resolution support and 32-bit internal colour processing. The scaling has also been improved between Premiere Pro 2 and Premeire Pro 3. Our Matrox RT.X2 Premiere Pro tutorial was all filmed at high definition and then pan and scanned in a normal PAL project. With Premiere 2 the output quality was just not good enough to be used. With Premiere Pro 3 the quality is excellent.

Support for AJA cards

Premiere Pro will automatically support the Xena HS real-time encoding card from AJA Video.  This card will support full SD and HD editing with component HD in and out.  AJA have a range of cards for adding i/o to Premeire, starting with the HS. Click here for more information.

HDV editing

The HDV editing was completely overhauled with Premiere Pro 2.  With 1.5.1 Adobe used a plug-in from Cineform to edit HDV footage.  This converted the footage on capture to a different format which allowed much better and slicker editing with realtime effects.  With Premiere Pro 2 Adobe have decided to write their own plug-in which, instead of using and intermediate uses the native MPEG files. 

MPEG is notoriously hard to edit so how have they done?  Well the answer is amazingly well.  Of course, you cannot achieve much in the way of realtime effects, even with a very fast PC, although a modest 3.4Ghz machine can manage a cross dissolve pretty easily.  You can also view your edits through the HD output of a graphic card on your PC and the quality is actually very good for a graphic card output.  If you want to edit with transcoded files there is an updated version of CineForm's Aspect HD for Premiere Pro 3 and this will have the advantage of more realtime playback with multiple layers etc all at full quality.  However the native MPEG editing of Premiere Pro has to be some of the best we have seen.   The minimum spec for HDV editing is a 3.4Ghz (old fashioned non-dual core) processor with 2GB RAM, however these daye we are selling much better Core2Duo processors that handle the HDV editing far better.

Which Operating system?

Premiere Pro 3 supports both Windows XP and Windows Vista and is the first of teh "pro" applications to support Vista. Neither Avid Liquid or Canopus Edius currently support Vista and their support is months away.

However, some of the cards you would put into an Adobe system do not currently support Vista. AJA promise Vista drivers soon after the release of the CS3 programs and Matrox say support will arrive later in the year. Black Magic are currently the only company with proper Vista drivers for their cards.

Should I use Vista or not?

Windows XP has a memory limit - you can only have a maximum of just over 3GB or RAM in an XP system. This can be a bit of a hassle if using editing software as it does use a lot of memory - particularly if doing large projects or using lots of applications at once - if, for example you use the whole Adobe Production Studio you have 8 programs that interact with each other so may have several open at one time. Some customers who have contacted us have thought that Vista would solve this problem, but the 32bit version of Vista has exactly the same lmitation as the 32bit version of XP. Its only when you use the 64bit version that you can access a lot more memory.

However the editing programs are all 32bit and no one has, as yet, written a 64 bit version or written 64bit drivers for any of the capture cards. So Windows Vista will not solve this problem.

However, Vista does have other advantages - such as a prettier interface - the biggest advantage being that it is supposed to stop the performance of you PC from deteriorating over time - as happens with the average Windows XP PC. It is also the future o/s for PCs and Windows XP will stop eventually.

At the moment their is no pressing need to move to it, however, so it is a matter of personal preference. Of course if you want to use Adobe software with a Matrox card then you cannot move to Vista until the drivers are released - which is scheduled for the end of the year. So you would stick to Windows XP because you want to use Matrox as it seriously improves your editing performance.

Shall I use a MAC?

With the advent of the CS3 programs they now all work on Intel based MACS as well as PCs (previously only a couple of items in the suite worked on Apple computers). In our opinion Macs are not intrinsicly better than PCs - like everything there is good stuff and bad stuff about both platforms. On a PC you can add cards like the Matrox RT.X2 and seriously improve the editing performance (more realtime effects, better editing and faster output), where as additional cards on a Mac basically add extra inputs and outputs. This is why cards like the AJA and Black Magic work on both platforms - because all they really add is extra i/o - and Matrox cards do not.

The main reason to use a Mac is if you are already a Mac user - moving from a MAC to a PC will be basically as irritating as moving from a PC to a MAC as you will suddenly have to re-learn basic operating system stuff. The fact that the new suite works on a Mac does mean that MAC users now have an alternative to Apple's programs and a decent program for Bluray writing as the current MAC programs does not support writing HD DVDs.

DVC Online Shopping > VIDEO EDITING > Adobe Premiere Pro