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 adjust video levels and colour balance.  Particularly useful are levels filter which gives a histogram display not unlike Photoshop, auto colour, auto contrast and auto level, do as their names suggest with sliders to adjust their sensitivity and shadow/highlight which allows you to bring out details in underexposed areas with out distorting correctly exposed regions.  In Premiere Pro 2 several new colour correction filters were 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 are 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 Grass Valley EDIUS GPU effects which have complete 3D effects like like the video folding into an aeroplane and flying off screen, but all the commonly used effects are covered. If you need the complex 3D-stlye effects you will have to add them. The best choices would be using some of the ProDad Adorage effects, Boris FX, or using a Matrox RT.X2 which adds various 3D effects.

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.

A decent image stabilsation program for Premiere Pro. Easy to use and quick Mercalli produces great results inside your editing program. You can do image stabilisation with Aodbe After Effects, which you will own if you buy the Production Studio. After Effects image stabilisation is very good, although not quite as easy to use as ProDads and you need to get your footage from Premiere to AE and back again to do it.

A range of filters which include glow and sparkle effects, image manipulation with movie-look style features, and various mask-style filters. Can be used with as a filter or transition.

Heroglyph is a titling program that lets you do animated 2D and 3D titles easily. It has quite a large variety of tools as well - not just for animating text but also drawing paths and even making video walls. Do you want to draw a route on a map? There is a tool for just this - you can even add an arrow or a little car at the start. Do you want to have some words drawn on screen and appear as if written - again Heroglyph has a tool for just this. Or do you want to have each letter of each word arrive and jump out at you as they do - again easy to do with Heroglyph.

Heroglyph plugs into Adobe Premiere 6.5, Adobe Premiere Pro 1, 1.5, 2 and CS3, as well as all variations of Premiere Elements. It also works in Avid Liquid 7, Avid Xpress Pro 5 and Media Composer 2, and Canopus Edius 3.x & 4.x. You can see more information on the ProDad Website.

Interestingly when plugged into Edius or Premiere it appears just like the other native titling programs - so in Edius you add it to the title track as you would with Title Motion Pro or Quick Titler, and you can even choose it as the default title program so it appears every time you press the T button!

There are two versions of Heroglyph - the full version and Heroglyph Rapid. The Rapid version is the same as the full but with less control and animation capabilities.

Adorage

Adorage is a range of complex and wacky transitions. There are several volumes with hundreds of transitions in each volume. The shear bredth of transitions available is staggering, Visit our ProDad pages for more information

Boris Continuum

A huge array of effects all of which include motion tracking for each effect - so you can make your effects “stick” to your subject.  Includes keyframable slow motion, decent keying and even a filter that can remove a moving object from a shot! Boris Continuum is £459 plus VAT

Boris FX 8 for Premiere Pro

Boris FX adds complex 3D motion paths plus a variety of useful filters, including motion tracking and image stabilisation, to Premiere Pro. Boris FX for Premiere Pro is £149 plus VAT

Boris Red

A full blown complex compositing application, which you can use as a plug-in inside Premiere..  When you use it, Red opens its own interface where you perform all you effects work.

If you choose Premiere you can achieve similar effects in the same way using Adobe After Effects, but Boris has some unique features.

For more information visit our Boris Pages.

Matrox Capture cards

The RT.X2 and Axio LE cards do not just add analogue i/o, ie SVIDEO, composite and component in and out. They also add a range of effects. These include better colour correction than the standard one included with Premiere Pro, decent chromakeying (Premiere Pro's basic keying is not very good) effects to add a shine to video or text, and a whole host of 3D effects. So for example you can take the image and paste it onto a 3D cube which flies around the screen, or a sphere, or add a decent page curl. All of these are customisable and work in realtime even with HD footage. The 3D effects use the graphic card in your PC to do all of the work - so the better the graphic card the more effects you can achieve.

For more information see our Matrox card pages.

Prices start from £760 +VAT and they can be bought with or without Premiere Pro.