Making Digital Movies with Premiere 5.1

Premiere 5.1, shown here building a movie preview from a collection of video clips, still images and sound files, has a dramatically revamped "tabbed" interface that resembles that of Photoshop and Illustrator.

Adobe Premiere 5.0 for the Macintosh and 32-bit Windows PCs was released in May 1998. Since then, it has been updated to version 5.1a

Premiere, in case you didn't know, is widely considered to be the leader in both Mac- and PC-based digital video editors. Version 5.x makes the most significant strides thus far in addressing the problems we noted in our 1996 review, in which we called Premiere's interface "a bit clumsy feeling." Most significantly, though, version 5.1 finally fixes a long-standing bug that caused the video in older versions of Premiere to fall out of sync with audio after a few minutes. (MacWeek has details.)

Premiere 5.1 also better supports systems with multiple capture cards -- another problem noted by many users in past versions. In all, Adobe has smoothed a lot of the rough edges and come up with a program that is well-suited to many types of users -- albeit still too slow and not keyboard-configurable for the high-end crowd, many of whom demand a program where every action can be assigned to a keystroke. These users also are unlikely to want to put up with Premiere's time consuming preview rendering process -- an issue that can be addressed by a special high-end version of Premiere called "RT" (for "real time"). For the rest of us, though, Premiere is one of the most flexible and powerful tools in its price range for working with digital video, whether the results are intended for multimedia, CD-ROM, video or Internet-related tasks.

QuickTime 3.0 ship with Premiere 5.x, which does not works with QT2.x. While QT3 is decidedly superior to version 2.x, we're sure there are some folks who might have favored a little backward compatibility with QT2.x, Indeed, video pros are precisely the kind of people who work hard to get a stable Mac or PC system software environment and, once they've got it don't want to mess with it by adding new system software to the mix.

We discovered that Premiere was unable to load certain MOV files, such as the "Get QuickTime Pro" advertisement that is installed with QT3.0, or QTVR panoramas. For most users, this won't be a problem.

Adobe, to its credit, shipped Premiere 5.x with a full version of QT3 Pro, avoiding the "virus-like, continual recreation of an unwanted file on every user's desktop," as Macintouch succinctly put it.

There's also a version of Premiere called Premiere 5 RT that uses specialized hardware to provide real-time effects rendering. Such packages, from Avid, Matrox, and others, start at about US$5000.

Order your upgrade directly from Adobe by calling 1-888-724-4507 (reference offer # 47701).  Or order on-line by visiting Adobe's website at http://www.adobe.com/proindex/premiere/main.html

You can upgrade to Premiere 5.0 from any version for US$199.00.

Plus, the company says if you order your upgrade directly from Adobe before July 31st, 1998, you can get an additional full copy of Adobe Premiere 5.0 for either platform (Macintosh or Windows) for only US$395.00

New features in Premiere 5.0:

Elegant New Interface

• View source clips and edited footage simultaneously in the efficient Monitor window.
• Add up to 99 video and 99 audio tracks. Then target, hide, display, and edit the content of those tracks with ease. 
• Manage any number of clips for your long and short projects.
• Move rapidly from one point in the Timeline to another using the new Navigator palette.
• Customize and add transitions quickly using the new Transitions palette.

Greater Editing Control

• Perform precise three-point edits using a Source/Program metaphor.
• Use slip and slide editing tools to preserve a clip's duration and duration of the overall movie, while changing the in and out points of the clip.
• Work easily using industry standard keyboard shortcuts.
• Work with professional audio tools including 14 new audio filters.
• Apply multiple keyframes to audio and video filters to modulate their effect over time.
• Add text rolls and crawls easily with the improved titling capabilities.

Extensive Hardware and Software Support

• Create and render projects up to 3 hours in length with precise audio-video synchronization.
• Capture, import and export digital video (DV) files with ease.
• Produce optimized Edit Decision Lists (EDL's).
• Enjoy complete cross-platform compatibility across Windows and Power Macintosh versions.
• Import individual Photoshop layers. Rasterize Illustrator EPS files automatically upon import.

For Further Reading:

• Premiere is discussed further in our Digital Video Toolkit articles part 1 and part 2.
• Also, see the Premiere 5.0 review at MacNN
• Our report on QuickTime 4 describes its new features.
• June 13, 2000: Apple's DV codec - Its implementation on the G4 is flawed. But there are solutions.