DMN Interview: Premiere Pro Premieres (Parts 1, 2 and 3 combined)
Editor's note: The following article is a compilation of a three-part interview published on Digital Media Net in mid-July, 2003.
In this candid interview with DMN's Charlie White at DV Expo in New York, Adobe Premiere Group Product Manager Richard Townhill talks about Premiere Pro's development, its lack of Mac support and much more.DMN: Adobe is saying this is the most significant upgrade of Premiere ever. What makes it so significant? Why should people look forward to using it?
Townhill: Well, that a very big question to answer, so essentially, it's a complete rewrite of the application, so there is pretty much nothing the same from the previous version of Premiere. Any version of Premiere which anybody is used to using -- nothing is the same, in this new version because we've overhauled everything. We've spent the last two and a half years rewriting the application from scratch. Premiere Pro, as its name suggests, is designed to be a more professional application with a lot more power. So some of the things which are fairly obvious -- which will strike you immediately -- is that we now support multiple nestable timelines, we support YUV processing, we support three-point color correction, we have a full set of scopes, we support sample-level audio editing, we support ASIO hardware for multichannel output, we support surround sound mixing, we support track-based effects which are VST filters. So those are the new feature highlights.
In addition to all of that, we have also made major workflow enhancements. So, for example, we've reduced the requirement to make tool changes during edits. We have put a lot more emphasis on, for example, shortcut keys, to allow you to accomplish a lot more with a single tool. In the majority of the cases, you should be able to go through an entire workflow without really having to change your tool too much. One of the complaints of Premiere has traditionally been, you can do all these things in Premiere 6.0 and 6.5, but more often than not you have to change tools three times, or you have to go down four menus. One of the things we have done with Premiere Pro is to eliminate that process. We've alleviated that pain threshold so the professional editor can just keep working without having to fight against the application. That gives you a brief overview, but it's a very hard question to answer.
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DMN: It's the whole question.
Townhill: It's the whole question, right, exactly.
DMN: There's been a perception that Premiere is not a professional application, and according to what we've seen today and what you have said, this really does bring Premiere into a whole different realm, into that of a professional application. Why do you think there was a perception of Premiere as not being professional before, and what do you think Adobe is doing to change that attitude people have about the product?
Townhill: I think why it was not perceived as a professional application before is that a lot of the tool sets in the application were probably non-intuitive to the professional user. So I'm very realistic about the reputation Premiere has, and I'm very realistic about the kind of product Premiere was before, and don't get me wrong, I think it was a great product. We have a large user base of loyal users who were working very successfully using the previous versions of Premiere. However, it's fair to say that some of the edit behavior… just to give you some specifics, the ability of previous versions of Premiere to override synch easily caused a lot of professional editors a great deal of heartache, because you'd get halfway down the timeline and then realize that everything was out of synch. The inability to be able to overwrite and insert directly on the timeline -- that would cause a lot of heartache because other professional-level editing applications don't work that way. So Premiere had been sort of relegated, at the professional spectrum of the marketplace, to more of a prosumer tool. And I think, being completely honest, it was probably fair to say that that's where it resided, largely because when you stacked it up against very high-end editing systems that the edit behavior was so different that it wasn't really intuitive to move between one application and the next. Like I say, you could do everything in Premiere 6.5 -- I really don't think that there's anything inside the higher-end system that you couldn't do in 6.5 -- but it was often counter-intuitive and required a lot more effort.
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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