What's new in Premiere Pro 3?

What's new in Premiere Pro 3?

Keyframable slow motion
There are two ways of achieving this in Premeire Pro 3. A timewarp filter, which has been taken from After Effects, or by directly adding speed keyframes on the timeline. Both have advantages. The Timewarp filter has a rendering mode called Pixel Motion which just not just frame blending like other slow motions but actually creates frames from those around it. This is processor intensive so rendering can be quite long but you can get siginificantly better results than with normal frame blended slow motion.

Timewarp follows the normal logic of keyframable slow motion as seen in After Effects, Avid Liquid etc which is fine but not the most intutive way of working. The other Premiere keyframable slow mo in Premiere Pro works directly on the timeline and is very easy to use - possibly the easiest keyframable slow motion we have used.

The quality of the slow motion has also been improved over Premiere Pro 2. If using a Matrox card then you would already have good quality slow motion. However, for software only users or those using Black Magic or Aja cards you had to rely on Premiere's engine which was not as good. Now Premiere renders slow motion a lot better.

Windows Vista Support
The whole Adobe suite now supports Windows Vista. Not many people have moved over to Vista yet and Adobe are one of the first. All the Suite programs support Windows Vista. They are all 32bit programs, so although they would run on 64bit Windows XP or Vista none of the other devices from Black Magic/AJA/Matrox would work and you would not get any real advantage. Of course no one has yet produced 64bit editing programs - very few programs are currently supporting Vista at all, 64 biot or 32bit, so Adobe is ahead of most people.

Flexibins
Ever been frustrated at the way Premiere's bins work? Flexibins are the answer. Now you can have loads of bins open at once, or have a series of bins open in the project window in different tabs (main video, sound effects, music etc..) It makes organising a large project very easy. Also the fast find box current in the effects window is added to the project window, which makes finding clips, by name or attribute, really easy.

Better memory support and better at large projects
Premiere was always bad a large projects - well a lot of work has gone into making it a lot better.

Better quality scaling
We are editing our RT.X2 tutorial in Premiere Pro 3, but we could not do it in Premiere Pro 2. Why? We filmed the output from a computer screen at 1920 x 1080 and then put that footage into a standard def project - pan and scanning where needed to emphasise the points. The output from Premiere Pro 2 was not really good enough but from Premiere Pro 3 it is excellent.

Export to Bluray
Bluray is an obvious thing to add to a new program and both Encore and Premiere now support Bluray writing. Premiere can only write a disc with video and no menus; if you want menus then export to Encore. HD-DVD is not supported purely because there are no HD-DVD writers available yet where as there are Bluray writers.

Export to Encore
Premiere Pro's DVD writing is no more - it was added in 2 and taken away in 3. Now you export to Encore and all writing is done there. The new export to Encore command will launch the Adobe Media Encoder, encode the footage with chapter points and then start Encore and make a timeline up. You then customise the video from there. This includes writing Bluray discs in either MPEG or H264 formats.

Public Beta available

A beta version of Premiere is available at Adobe Labs. This version cannot edit HDV or output to Bluray but you can play and edit with all the other new features. It will not work with RT.X2s as teh latter need new drivers which are not available yet. It may also mess up currently installed Adobe products so if you do want to give it a try use a system that you are not currently using for real work, or image the system first so you can always restore it to working with Premiere Pro 2 later.

The beta version actually works well and is pretty reliable. Of course, being beta it is actually meant to be full of bugs unlike the final releases which are meant to not have any bugs (but always have a few tucked away somewhere!)

There is also a beta version of After Effects on the same site.

Encore 3

The biggest new feature is Bluray writing - followed closely but the ability to output your projects to Flash. Bluray writing lets you make an HD disc with all the functionality of a normal DVD - menus, interactivity, subtitles, different audio tracks etc... Like Sonic DVDitPro HD (the only other decent program that currently supports Bluray) it does not support the new fancy menus seen in commercial discs (which will come in a later version no doubt) but will make proper discs. We have also had some success making discs that play back on Playstation 3s and commercial players, as we have with DVDit Pro HD.

There are quite a few similarities between Enore and DVDitPro HD in general liek flowchat view and Photoshop integration. The major difference for High definition DVDS is that Encore will encode into both MPEG2 and H264 where as Sonic only currently supports MPEG2. H264 will let you get more on a disc and keep the quality up, which is important since the first writable discs we can buy are only single layer, 25GB and not dual layer, or 50GB.

The other unique Encore feature is export to Flash. Adobe bought Macromedia last year and are now using the fact that they own the best web software available with their video products. To make a Flash website animation with interactivity you need to learn Flash. However, Encore will let you set up interactive menus with video clips and then save the whole thing as a Flash animation. So without knowing Flash you can add fancy looking Flash to your website just by knowing Encore!

Also you can make one project - a Bluray project for example - and then output to a standard DVD, Flash or Bluray disc at the rendering stage and everything is encoded accordingly.

The other, very useful, major change is that Encore 3 will now take all sorts of files of different formats and sizes into the project - not just 720 x 576 PAL footage.