Audio support in Premiere ProOne 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. | 
