DMN Interview, Part 2: Premiere Pro Premieres
Missed part 1? Click on these words for the first part of this exclusive DMN interview.
In part 2 of DMN's exclusive interview with Adobe Premiere Group Product Manager Richard Townhill, the discussion turns to some of the new features of the significantly improved application, Premiere Pro. Townhill also explains to DMN Executive Producer Charlie White why Adobe decided to abandon the Mac platform with this re-written nonlinear editing application, set to release in August.DMN: Anything new with capturing?
Townhill: Why, yes. Some might say it's about time, but we've added scene detection to our capture tools. That's one of the most obvious things. Actually, it's slightly more subtle in its variations as well. We now support batch capture to offline files in the Project window. Let me explain a bit about what that means. If you're an existing Premiere user, you're used to the idea of having Premiere create a batch capture list, which is sort of a weird paradigm which doesn't quite fit into your project -- it just gives you this list of offline files which you then re-capture. What Premiere Pro does, is when you log a clip -- but, for example, haven't captured it -- it will actually create an offline file in your project area in the bin that you specify. So you can then go back and re-capture that material later, directly in the project you're working in. Not only that, but if you go beyond the capture stage, you can actually link and unlink that material. You can go into the Premiere project and say, "Unlink this and recapture it using the following settings." For example, a good illustration of that would be an HD workflow, where you can capture everything in DV resolution, make your edit, you can unlink the files and then re-capture them just in the HD format. That's a process that you wouldn't have been able to achieve using the batch capture lists inside of Premiere 6.5. As well as doing the big and obvious thing which is going to affect the majority of our customers which is adding scene detection, we've also added some additional file management and media management additions by doing the offline file management workflow.
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DMN: There are some new YUV features in here. Can you explain briefly for the readers who don't understand the difference between YUV and RGB, what the difference is in Premiere and why that's going to benefit users?
Townhill: Absolutely. YUV and RGB are color spaces, in other words, it's how color information is stored. YUV is the native format for videotape. So, for example, when somebody records video onto a DV tape, it's being stored as YUV, and I'm sure you know, it's luminance [brightness] and chrominance [color] information. So the luminance and chrominance information is separated rather than storing three different color values in red, green and blue. So what was happing in previous versions of Premiere, was that this information was being transmitted to Premiere through the DV port, the 1394 port, as YUV and Premiere was doing a conversion on the fly from YUV to RGB. So first of all, there's some downtime in the computer by simply doing that conversion. This process is compounded by the fact that RGB data is actually larger than YUV data, so there's more information to be pushed around after that conversion has taken place. And then finally, when you're done, you're going back out to tape, and of course, the reverse has to happen. You have to go from RGB back to YUV. So again, there's another conversion step involved in that process. Now, these things only take milliseconds, however, they stack up over time. When you try to push real time video around on multiple channels, every millisecond counts. So by moving to a YUV pipeline, number one, the video quality is much better, so internally now, Premiere Pro is YUV. When that data comes off tape, no conversion takes place, so no loss can occur, and the video quality looks better. The second thing is, there's no transcoding either in or out, so that's two steps that you've eliminated. Number one, you've eliminated the loss, and number two, you've eliminated the time it takes. And then finally, because we're using YUV data internally, what happens is you're simply moving less data around, and consequently the speed enhancements -- you benefit from those as well. So the benefits from going to a YUV pipeline are multi-faceted.
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