Premiere Pro 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 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 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.

The Best Plug-Ins For Adobe Premiere Pro

Magic Bullet

This plug-in can make your video look like film.  Not  the average “deinterlace and add scratches look” found in many programs, but real changes to the overall colour grading of the image - using a series of customisable presets. They can make your video look far more atmospheric. Version 2 now includes faster rendering using an nVidia graphic card in your PC.

Magic Bullet will also work in Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress Pro.

Magic Bullet Editors:     £225 plus-VAT
Full Magic Bullet Suite:     £450 plus-VAT.

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. Boris Red is £949 plus VAT or £449 plus VAT for owners of ANY Boris product.

Matrox Capture cards

The RT.X2 and Axio LE cards are not just plug-ins for extra effects.  They do add a large range of effects to Premiere Pro, but also add analogue i/o, realtime output through FireWire/Y/C component or SDI (depending on the card) and several layers of full quality realtime effects.

RT.X2 adds HDV and HD through component. RT.X2 with Premiere Pro 3 is £999.00 ex-VAT.

Axio LE adds SD and HD SDI to the other inputs and outputs. Axio LE is £2195 ex-VAT