Premiere Pro: No More Compromises
Page 3 of 4
Creating transitions is different, too, and better than ever. There's no more A/B style timeline, with the transitions track in between. I had gotten used to that in previous versions of Premiere, even though you could choose not to use that paradigm before, too. But it took me about five minutes to become accustomed to the new way of doing things, and now I like it a lot better. The new method is to grab the transition from the video transitions folder and drop it on top of the edges of two clips on the timeline. Before you drop that transition, you can see the icon change as you move it over the gap, allowing you to bias toward the outgoing or incoming clips, or place it in between them. Then after you've dropped that transition roughly in place, when you want even more control just double-click on the transition and a new control window opens that looks a lot like Adobe After Effects. Drag on top of any numbers and your cursor turns into an arrow, letting you adjust the numbers higher or lower by dragging.
Another surprise for Premiere users is the new way you can add transitions in the video 2, 3, etc. window, where you had to diddle with rubber bands to adjust transparency before, a routine I always thought felt like a kludge. But if you've gotten used to doing transitions in the higher tracks that way, you can still goof around with rubber bands if you want. More evidence of the re-worked After Effects-like graphics engine lets you directly manipulate effects in the monitor window with your mouse. And, you can also now adjust your each parameter of your keyframes directly on the timeline. Wow.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The performance of Premiere's real-time previewing is also quite good. You're able to see all your ministrations in real time on an external NTSC monitor. It's scalable, and takes full advantage of Intel's Hyperthreading processors. As with other software-based real time products, this scalability bodes well for the future, where processor speeds get faster all the time. You can easily preview two layers and a key with Premiere even with run-of-the-mill equipment, so imagine what will happen two years from now with a machine twice as fast as the fastest one is now. I like this scalability thing. And, once you're finished with all your editing and previewing, the rendering is fast, too. You'll see a red bar that indicates that rendering is needed on final output, but it's a render-once operation. You hit Enter and the rendering starts, and it goes very quickly even on a machine that's not exactly a fire-breather like this 2.5GHz single processor machine on which I tested it here.
I also like the way Premiere Pro has learned to play nice, even with its competitors -- it can now export to AAF (Advanced Authoring Format), where other AAF-compliant editing software, growing in number every day, will be able to recognize your timeline and project data. I've seen a demo of this AAF in action with apps like Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer and Quantel eQ, and let me tell you, this is going to be big when (if?) everybody else gets on board. It's like a universal translator for video editing data.
Prev 1 2 3 4 Next
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
