Review : Premiere 6.5

Adobe has released the next step of Premiere. Premiere has gained a very strong foothold in the video editing world and is used a a lot of video productions. Initially released in 1991 it is one of the most used tools for video and image processing and compositing. Complemented by other Adobe products such as Photoshop and After effects it offers a complete editing studio in a box.

Well known Blockbuster hits such as 'The Matrix' passed through the capable code that makes up this program.

Although Premiere 6.01 was already a fairly bug-free program the 6.5 version fixes a couple of problems and holes. It is now a full windows XP compliant program and can use any WDM or DirectX source. A number of tools have been improved and additional device control decreases the requirement of external tools.

Besides the fixes this new version also brings a lot of new features and tools to explore your creative capabilities to their extents.

What's in the box ?

Premiere comes in 2 forms: either as an upgrade for owners of an existing version. Priced at 149 US$ , or as a full version at 599 US$. Hardware vendors that still ship the 6.0 version offer an update for an even lower price. Pinnacle Pro-One owners that bought the card after May of this year can get Premiere 6.5 for 19 $ via pinnacle's website.

The bundle has , besides the 6.5 CD ROM , a new version of Sonic Desktop's Smartsound that includes additional tracks. Sonic's DVD-LE is also included and premier can dump its output directly to a DVD-Le project directory.

The lite version of Adobe Type manager and a bundle of ATM fonts is also included. The software is complemented by an extensive manual set and an interactive learning CD-ROM that has updated material for this 6.5 version of Premiere.

Overview of Premiere

Premiere is a Nonlinear Editing (NLE) tool. This means that you can rip video out of sequence and arrange anything in any order you want. The tool will then construct an output stream exactly like you specified it. Since you will be working with lots of media , images , video , audio , titles and effects the workspace might look frightening but it really isn't. Everything has its place, but because of the sheer number of panels a big monitor is really a must. A 17 inch running at 1280 by 1024 runs very smoothly although 1024 by 768 is still just workable.

. The top left panel is your source bin. This shows all the media available for you to arrange on the project. In the top center of the screen is your preview window that shows you what is happening where the 'scrubber' is. The scrubber is a vertical line that walks the Timeline at the big window that takes up half of the screen.

The timeline shows you the chronological order in which everything was arranged , the applied effects and transitions , and the audio tracks. You can even visualize the audio waveform for easier manipulation. The remaining panels on the right hand side of the screen show you all available effect and transitions. Applying these is a simple matter of drag and drop. Finally the little right top window with the blue band shows an overview of your entire project. You can use this to quickly navigate to a section. The timeline shows you what is going on there in more detail.

New features of Premiere 6.5

Premiere 6.5 builds on this user interface that has changed little since version 4.0

This version of premiere has a Realtime preview . The old option to preview to RAM has been completely removed. Depending on your processor speed premiere will show the edited video as it is. No more little square cross in the image that tells you that there is an effect here but it still has to be rendered. Premiere uses an adaptive algorithm to show you a preview in the monitor. Depending on processor load it will render in better or less quality. Before you export the final file the rendering still takes place to disk. But there is no more waiting to see the effect of the applied filters and effects on the video strip. This gives you a faster creative process with less dead time.

The standard titling generator is still there but it has been complemented by a more user friendly and much more powerful titling generator.