Premiere Pro: No More Compromises
Adobe Premiere Pro is an all-new version of the company's popular nonlinear editing software, and it's a remarkable product that boasts interface improvements, better performance and more professional features. Offered for Windows only, the software is designed to take advantage of the hyperthreading built into the newest Intel chips, and uses the processor to eliminate much of the rendering usually required when working with video. It's a great improvement overall. Let's take an in-depth look.When you first open Premiere Pro (it's actually Premiere 7.0), you immediately notice it's drastically different from the previous version, Premiere 6.5. Its icons look more refined -- now they appear downright "pillowy," reminding me of Avid DS. There are lots of ways to adjust the interface to your liking, too. For example, if the windows look too bright or dark for you, clicking on Edit/Preferences/General lets you change the overall brightness of the insides of the windows. This is a neat feature I haven't see before. If you'd like to jump between several preset window layouts, Premiere Pro offers a new menu item that lets you choose specially-designed configurations for functions like audio editing, color correction, compositing and video editing, and lets you save your own favorite looks, too.
Another plus you'll notice right away is Premiere Pro's newfound ability to handle multiple timelines -- now called sequences -- and the ability to apply an effect to an entire sequence. No more futzing with those old Virtual Clips from Premiere's non-Pro past. And, you can drag and drop an entire sequence onto another sequence, a routine that could be helpful, for example, if you have a certain boilerplate tag you use every week.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Beyond that important new capability, the software is packed with little enhancements that you'll appreciate, like the way a new track is created for you automatically when you drag a clip into a gray area on the timeline. Another unusual feature is the ability to group clips together, even if they're not contiguous, and then they behave as a single clip. I certainly welcome the non-global nature of the track height, too. Now you can individually drag a track to make it a lot taller (or shorter) without affecting any others. That's a Vegas (nee "Vegas Video", another popular Windows-based video editing program, not the city) feature that I'm glad to see in Premiere Pro.
It's also worth noting that not only are there superficial improvements in Premiere Pro -- the whole basement of the program has been overhauled as well. The new way of doing things is all-YUV color space, where there is no chasm to be crossed into the computer-centric RGB color space. Since YUV is the native format of video, this makes great sense, and I think it's responsible for some of the improved performance I noticed while working with Premiere over the past month.
Thankfully, the ability to do scene detection on capture is a long-awaited feature that's finally found its way into Premiere. It's a huge convenience to tell Premiere to just capture each shot on a DV tape, or to start capturing shots from a particular place on a tape. Then your captured clips are all sitting there in your bin when you're ready to start editing. It's surprising that it took this long for scene detection to be implemented in Premiere, given that this feature has been a staple of lesser programs for years. It's a welcome addition that I like a lot.
1 2 3 4 Next
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
