NAB Day 2: Premiere 7 Shown to NAB Crowd
NAB 2003 got off to a rousing start Monday morning with a demo session from Adobe. To the palpable shock and awe of the audience, Adobe’s demo artist launched a Beta copy of Adobe Premiere 7.0, while coyly refusing to admit which application he was actually running. Any observant onlookers quickly noticed the words Premiere 7.0 in the title bar, though. Take a look at this screen shot, the first to be published in the world:
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| Click for enlargement -- Here's a screen shot of Adobe Premiere 7.0 |
A quick run through the new features showed an enhanced real time preview system with greatly improved color correction controls, infinitely nested timelines where you can easily drop one timeline within another, great new audio EQ controls, and track sizes that are now independently sizable. The keyframability has also been given a major boost, with the controls getting to be a whole lot more like After Effects. After a tantalizing few minutes of smooth running with nary a crash, the demo made a smooth transition to the next tropic with the host telling us that’s only about a tenth of what’s coming for the new, super-secret Premiere 7.0. I like what I see so far!
What would be next? More secrets revealed? Yes! The demo was centered around Adobe's awesome new DVD authoring application, Encore DVD (see screen shot below), but we saw it on a round trip route that passed by Photoshop and none other than another shocker, the beta of a new version of After Effects, the version number of which the demo artist wouldn’t say. Anyway, the reason the guy opened these other two applications at the same time as Encore DVD was to prove that they all work tightly together. In fact, Encore has exactly the same render engine as Photoshop, so all layers and parameters are perfectly imported from one application to another.
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| Adobe Encore DVD screen shot |
The AE tease was to show us that AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) is alive and well at Adobe, where the same project that was created in Premiere 7 was imported into After Effects, with all the picture-in-picture effects, paths, and dissolves opened up perfectly in After Effects. This is what Metadata can do for you. Noticeably absent from the entire demo session, which included talks from Intel and Microsoft brass, was any mention of the Mac, which, as far as Adobe at NAB is concerned, has fallen off the earth. I can tell you this: Apple has a lot of neat stuff, but there’s one thing it doesn’t have, and that’s Photoshop. And Photoshop works with Encore DVD, Premiere and After Effects as if they could all use the same toothbrush without thinking twice about it. The neat tick here is exploiting the power of editing Photoshop files within a DVD application. That’s some interoperability that’ll be impossible to beat. At the same time, work-saving features and improved built-in compression ensures that Encore DVD – not available on the Mac -- will be a major contender. It’s my pick for DVD app of the year, hands down, no question. Adobe really opened the kimono on this one, showing all the other software players who’s the real boss around here. This was an astonishing demo that blew everyone’s socks off.
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Then it was off to Serious Magics demo, where the company that wowed us with Visual Communicator has released Ultra Key, a great chromakeyer that can track 3D images as part of an exquisite virtual set production package. To be priced at $795 and shipping in early June, the system comes with a dozen high-resolution animated virtual set backgrounds, where you shoot your talent on a locked-down shot, and then that scene is perfectly tracked inside great-looking graphics. Some of the animations will even let you place a second source in another key window. All this is easy to use, too with a slick interface that reminds me of a Visual Communicator interface in an enhanced and highly professional trim. This is pro gear all the way, with key quality that’s been seriously goosed. Definitely worth a close look.
Next stop was the NewTek area, with a demo of the newest Toaster that’s not called Toaster any more -- it’s VT [3], whose best new feature is its ability to let you switch multiple DV cameras. There are also new features like Bezier curves for keyframing, frame accurate 1394 batch capture, and excellent proc amp controls in preview mode, just like in a big-time engineering control room. And, the price is right, at $2495 if you buy Toaster [2] now -- then you’ll get the upgrade to VT [3] for free when it ships in Q3. Such a deal.
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