ADOBE PREMIERE:
Truly First in Its Class

 James G. DeRuvo, Hardware Editor

When the director of ROGUE (a film I wrote - check it out at http://www.rogue-themovie.com) got around to editing, he struggled with several things in Premiere 5.1. He got the job done - and in thrilling style, mind you - but it was a lot harder than it should have been. 

Adobe 6.0 has made editing on a PC much easier now.

With an emphasis on gearing the product toward the digital filmmaker, Adobe fired a shot across Apple's bow in an effort to compete with the new Final Cut Vs. 3.0. 

And it works. 

Cool new features like a more interactive Project Bin window make it much easier to organize and find imported media clips. 

Digital vidiots now have the ability to compress their films for the web with the Cleaner LE! No more exporting and importing into a secondary compression utility. And that saves time. Cleaner supports the big three … RealVideo, QuickTime, or Windows Media file … it will even upload straight to the Web for you.

Alas, Cleaner LE is limited, so if you want to go frame to frame in your compression, you will need to buy the Pro edition. But for an all in one add-in application, it can get the job done. 

Capturing footage in Premiere is about the same - which is nothing too special. And frankly, it's much easier to use Apple's iMovie to capture and then export to Quicktime for import into Premiere.

There's a trick new audio mixer though - even looking like a board - that allows sweetening of multi audio tracks in real time. A very cool addition.

Sadly, Premiere 6 included Pinnacle Systems' TitleDeko for titling. I've never liked that application and I would have preferred that Adobe had built their own. But if you have After Effects, you can create darling titles that will import in with no effort at all.

I really like Premiere as an editing platform. Sure, other programs may have more bells and whistles, but Premiere is much more solid and stable. And with the ability to interface with After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator … it's well worth it to commit to it as a non-linear platform.

Copyright © 2002 by R. Scott Bolton. All rights reserved.
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Revised: February 10, 2002 01:28 PM Pacific Time.