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Leveraging powerful software packages such as Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (about $700 street price) takes another incremental step forward, proving itself worthy of wearing that Pro name tag. At the same time, if you have neither the time nor inclination to dig deep inside every fine-tuning feature, Premiere Pro has the automated smarts to let you take the easy way out while still giving you an advanced feature set and nearly boundless flexibility. Let's see what's new in version 1.5 and explore what makes this a world-class editing and effects package for all levels of production expertise.
One of the enhanced nonlinear editing capabilities of version 1.5 is its more efficient file management power, especially useful when dealing with the huge files associated with high definition. Now playing nicely with HD plug-ins like Prospect HD from CineForm, which is capable of HD SDI input and output, Premiere Pro 1.5's new Project Manager now lets you edit smaller proxies of your HD project, and then re-capture just the frames you actually used in that rough cut when it?s time for the full-sized final edit. A dialog box (pictured below) lets you designate the duration of the handles on either side of each clip, in case you want to tweak further after you have the large files in place. Adobe tells us companies like HD producer Voom in New York are already putting this power to good use, doing a crash edit in DV first, and then conforming the final full-rez HD clips using the Project Manager. After all is finalized, the company outputs the final production on a Bluefish card to full-rez HD.
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| Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 Project Manager |
Also at the top of the power list for Premiere Pro 1.5 is the Adobe After Effects engine nestled under the hood. This was implemented when Adobe released the 1.0 version of Premiere Pro, but now the Adobians have taken this trick a giant step further with the ability to copy clips in Premiere and then paste them into After Effects 6.5. Let's just think about the implications of that for a minute -- this gives Adobe a competitive advantage over any other companies that don't have a powerhouse compositor like After Effects in their stables. Making all their applications directly speak to each other is just the ticket for great workflow, and the fact that Premiere now can converse with After Effects, as well as Photoshop, Encore and Audition, gives Premiere an appeal that's exponentially more compelling than it was before. Not only does Premiere interact freely with After Effects, it even looks a lot like it, and its keyframe editor is nearly identical.
Here's how this new interaction works: If you've built up a number of layers on the Premiere timeline, you select those layers by dragging across them, and then with a simple Control-C command, they're copied. (See graphic below) Go into After Effects 6.5, and you're now able to paste those clips into the After Effects timeline, complete with all the keyframes you added in Premiere. After you've added some After Effects magic to those clips, you can then copy and paste them back into the Premiere timeline. This is the beginning of something big, in my opinion. But I think the concept still has a way to go before it's perfect. For example, if you've added keyframes to a clip in Premiere Pro, and then shortened that clip, your shortening won't show up in After Effects, although all the keyframes are faithfully included. And, something that I found sometimes good and sometimes bad is the fact that whatever you paste into the After Effects timeline is at the same time code location as it was in Premiere -- for example, if your group of clips was at 3:00:00 on the Premiere timeline, that's where they'll be in your new comp in After Effects. Now this can be a good thing, keeping these time code numbers intact, but it's also slightly confusing when you paste a group of clips into After Effects and see nothing at first until you scroll forward to the clips' location. I also noticed that titles you create in Premiere Pro don't make the jump to After Effects, but then After Effects can do such remarkable things with text effects that I think you might want to create those in After Effects, anyway. But these are small complaints, considering that this kind of interoperability represents a leap in productivity while using these two excellent applications from Adobe. And, not only can you copy and paste clips from one to the other, you can open entire projects created in Premiere Pro in After Effects. This opens up a whole new way of working for Premiere Pro users.
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| Copy an effects sequence from Premiere Pro's timeline (above), and then paste those clips into After Effects (below).  |
Adobe doesn't just stop there with its new interoperability with After Effects, either. Another example of blending of powerful apps is in Premiere Pro's new relationship with another of its mighty siblings, Photoshop. You've already had some degree of interoperability with Photoshop in Premiere in past versions, including the ability to import Photoshop layers into Premiere, but now the interoperability with Photoshop CS is even more sophisticated. There's now a menu command in Premiere Pro that opens a still for you in Photoshop CS, where you can edit that image and then save it and it appears right there in Premiere Pro. It's more or less a live link between the two programs, where there's no more fiddling with square or rectangular pixels -- it's all taken care of for you.
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