New
Editing Techniques with Adobe Premiere
Pro
by Douglas Dixon, Manifest
Technology, www.manifest-tech.com
Premiere
Pro
Timeline
Editing
Drag
and Drop Editing
Video Effects
Audio Editing
Adobe
Family Integration
The
Adobe Video Collection
References
Adobe
Premiere has been the long-time flagship
desktop digital video editing application.
But in recent years Adobe has been slow to
update it to add new features to take
advantage of newer computer hardware and
operating systems. By the last incremental
step to Premiere 6.5, released in August
2002, Adobe had taken the old Premiere
software code base about as far as it could
go. It was time for a major leap.
In August
2003, Adobe shipped its answer -- Premiere
Pro -- the next generation Premiere.
This is not just a step up from a 6.5 to a
7.0 version; this is a completely new beast.
Premiere Pro is a total rewrite, a brand new
application designed to address the needs of
today's professional video production.
One major
decision Adobe has made with its product
line is to focus on the Windows XP platform
for new development, so both Premiere Pro
and the new Encore DVD authoring tool are
PC-only and XP-only applications that take
advantage of the full Windows XP digital
media infrastructure. Adobe has made the
business decision to move away from
supporting the Macintosh, based both on the
sales of Premiere, and Apple's aggressive
development and pricing of Final Cut Pro and
Final Cut Express as part of its own drive
into digital media.
Because it
is totally rewritten, Premiere Pro is more
of a 1.0 application, albeit created in the
Premiere style. What this means to current
Premiere users is that you cannot expect
that Premiere Pro works exactly like the old
Premiere. Instead of having a baseline of
all the old features in the new release,
with Premiere Pro the old features remain
only when the development team explicitly
re-created them in the new application. For
example, the Storyboard is gone, although
partially replaced by the Icon view in the
Project window, and the Project Settings
window did not make the first release, so
it's more difficult to check that your
settings are consistent across the project.
In exchange
for this dramatic change, Premiere Pro
offers much more powerful video and audio
processing capabilities. Premiere Pro now
provides a "render-free" editing
experience, with rendering only required for
the final output. It supports
multiple-processor and hyper-threaded
systems, of course, and provides real-time
preview without waiting to render. And it
supports a full range of formats, from DV to
SD and HD, Web, and DVD. It also exports
Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) files to
exchange projects with other professional
editors and Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO)
for interfacing to audio hardware and
systems.
Premiere
Pro processes video in native YUV color
space, eliminating processing overhead and
quality loss from color conversions. It
finally supports DV scene detection to split
an input tape into separate clips. You can
use proxy video for offline editing, and
then batch capture full-resolution versions
for the final edit.
Premiere
Pro also provides stronger media management,
for tracking and recapturing offline clips.
Input media is imported at its native
resolution, with its aspect ratio adjusted
to match the project. This makes it easier,
for example, to create pans over large
stills.
Premiere
Pro includes built-in export to formats
including DV, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Windows
Media 9, RealVideo 9, WAV and AIFF audio,
and a variety of still image formats
including Photoshop (PSD). Through the
Windows XP architecture, Premiere also can
export to a variety of other formats as
supported on the target system, including
QuickTime.
For fast
export to DVD, Premiere Pro includes a Print
to DVD option to burn a project directly to
DVD. Or export to Adobe Encore DVD to add
menus and other DVD features.
The most
dramatic interface improvement in Premiere
Pro is support for multiple and nested
timelines. You can create components of your
project in separate timelines (called
Sequences), and then nest them as elements
in a master timeline to build up your
project. Sequences can be docked as tabs in
the Monitor and Timeline windows, or you can
drag them out as separate windows. This not
only makes it easier to organize your work
in more complex projects, but also allows
you to apply effects in one operation to an
entire nested sequence. You also can easily
try out different versions of a project by
copying a timeline.
On the
Timeline, however, the most visible change
is the demise of A/B editing. Premiere Pro
supports only single-track editing, with
clips and transitions overlapping in each
track on the timeline. This can be a
significant change for some users, but
supports a more efficient workflow.
Transitions
in single-track timeline - in Effects
palette on left
Effect Controls with
A-B like view - preview in Monitor
The key
thing to understand about single-track
editing is to make sure that you include
sufficient handles, or excess frames, at
each end of your clips in order to have
enough overlapped material for transitions.
Since you can't visualize overlapping clips
very well in a single track, Premiere Pro
provides a remnant of the A/B view in the
Effects Control window to fine-tune the
transition between overlapping clips.
The
Premiere Pro interface has been redesigned
to reduce the need to switch between
different tools. Trimming is as easy as
dragging the edges of a clip, or you can use
the separate Trim window for more precise
editing. You can perform basic operations
with drag and drop editing by using keyboard
modifiers:
- To delete
or move a clip, just click and drag
to Lift a clip: Delete it and leave a
gap on the timeline, without affecting the
adjacent clips. Or hold down the Ctrl
key as you click to Extract the clip:
Ripple Delete it and close the gap by
sliding down the rest of the timeline
contents.
- To overlay
or insert a clip, again just drag and
drop to perform the basic operation: Overlay
it on top of the current contents of the
timeline. Or hold down Ctrl as you
drop to Insert the clip, and shift
over the rest of the timeline contents.
That's not
too hard to remember: just drag and drop
to affect just the clip, or hold the Ctrl
key to ripple the edit along the
timeline. This trick even works when you are
doing a drag and drop to perform two actions
in one operation: you have the option to
hold or release Ctrl both when dragging, and
then when dropping, so you can lift or
extract and then overlay or insert all in
one smooth operation.
To make
this process even easier to learn, Premiere
Pro changes the cursor icon at each point in
an edit operation, and also provides a
dynamic text message hint in the status area
at the bottom of the screen.
For more
fun, you can hold the Alt key at the same
time to have the operation only affect the
selected target tracks, instead of the
entire timeline. You also can select
multiple clips and apply edits to all of
them at once.
As a result
of these editing improvements, the Tools
palette has been greatly simplified from
previous versions of Premiere. It no longer
has a profusion of pop-out alternate tools,
but only a small set of necessary tools for
timeline track adjustments, especially
Ripple and Rolling and Slip and Slide edits.
Other new efficiencies include the ability
to customize the height and display of
individual tracks in the timeline, and
customizable keyboard shortcuts and
workspaces.
The effects
architecture in Premiere Pro now provides
independent customization and keyframes for
individual parameters. The new Effects
Control window not only shows the effects
applied to a clip, and their individual
parameters, but then expands to provide a
custom timeline for applying keyframes. You
can enable keyframing for any individual
parameter, and then drop individual
keyframes at any point in the timeline to
modify its setting at that point. Motion
effects also can be set by drag and drop in
the Monitor window, and motion paths can be
smoother, with sub-pixel positioning and
ease in/out settings.
Motion
effects - in Video Effects palette
Keyframeable individual
parameters
Title overlay in
motion, changing scale, and opacity
As a new
effect, Premiere Pro also adds 3-point color
correction, to adjust highlights, midtones,
and shadows, or match colors. It also
provides a variety of built-in waveform and
vectorscope displays to help monitor color
and brightness.
New Color
Correction -
Effects palette on
left, adjustments in Effect Controls
palette
For audio
work, Premiere Pro now can import and export
up to 24-bit 96 KHz audio files. You can
edit multi-channel audio, including 5.1
surround, with surround mixing and Dolby
Digital AC-3 export (through a trial version
of the Minnetonka Audio SurCode
encoder).
You can
edit individual tracks to the sub-frame or
audio sample level, and apply audio effects
to individual tracks. Audio tracks also can
be combined and processed together as submix
tracks, for example to apply different
effects to voice and music tracks.
Audio
editing - Audio effects with Dynamics
filter -
Select in Effects
palette on left
Adjust filter controls
in Effect Controls palette
View audio waveforms in
timeline
Audio Mixer with
real-time feedback
To support
this audio processing, Premiere Pro needs to
pre-process or "conform" input
audio files to the project format by
converting them in the background. This is
required to play, mix, and display the
audio, which means you will need to wait a
while for longer files, as Premiere Pro
fills clips by silence until the conforming
completes.
You can use
the improved Audio Mixer to capture audio
(such as voiceovers) directly to the
timeline. You then can set levels in real
time as you listen to audio playback.
Premiere
Pro supports the VST audio plug-in standard,
so you can add new effects plug-ins.
Premiere Pro ships with 17 such effects,
including Equalize, Dynamics, DeNoiser, and
Pitch Shift.
Premiere
Pro shares common interface elements with
other Adobe tools, including tabbed windows
and floating palettes. It also provides ever
stronger integration of file and data
formats with the other Adobe applications.
Premiere
Pro can import layered Photoshop
files either as a single flattened file, or
with each layer arranged on a separate video
track.
After
Effects 6.0 can import Premiere Pro
projects with video and audio layers on its
timeline, including nested sequences, and
conversion of motion and opacity keyframes,
crops, and cross-dissolves.
Premiere
Pro and After Effects can use Edit Original
to open audio files in Audition for
further editing. Audition can then open the
editing session (project) associated with a
WAV file.
For DVD
authoring, Premiere Pro exports AVI and MPEG
files for use in Encore DVD. You can choose
your preferred workflow: use Premiere to
compress to DVD-ready MPEG format, or import
and compress AVI files in Encore. With AVI
files, use Edit Original in Encore to open
and edit the file in Premiere. With MPEG
files, markers in Premiere will be used as
chapter points in Encore.
The new
Premiere Pro is part of a major overhaul of
Adobe's digital media product line,
including Premiere for video editing, the
new Adobe Audition for audio editing
(a re-branded version of Cool Edit Pro
acquired from Syntrillium), new After
Effects version 6.0 for
compositing and effects, and the new Adobe
Encore DVD for DVD authoring.
You can buy
these programs individually, or bundled
together in the new Adobe Video
Collection. Premiere Pro is priced at US
$699 (estimated street price), or $199 to
upgrade from any version or platform.
All four
programs also are available together bundled
in the Standard edition of the Adobe Video
Collection for $999, or the Professional
edition for $1499, also including Photoshop
7.0 and the professional version of After
Effects.
Premiere
Pro also is available bundled with video
hardware, especially realtime editing
systems that provide video capture,
acceleration, and output. Matrox has
announced support for Premiere Pro with its RT.X100
Xtreme and RT.X10 Xtra systems, and Canopus
with its DVStorm2 and DVRaptor RT2.
ADS Tech is also shipping its PYRO
Professional 1394/FireWire card with
full versions of the latest Adobe products,
Premiere Pro, Encore DVD and Audition, for
$499.
With this
new release, Adobe has leapfrogged Premiere
Pro into the forefront of next-generation
Windows XP video editors. For users, this
means a smoother and more efficient editing
experience, with real-time preview,
drag-and-drop manipulations of clips in the
timeline, and better organization of
projects in multiple timelines.
Since this
is a brand new software product, you can
expect some glitches in delivering all this
functionality and power. Clearly, Adobe
needs to optimize the background processing,
especially for conforming audio. But this
powerful new platform positions Adobe to
continue to improve Premiere Pro in future
versions.
Adobe -
Premiere Pro
www.adobe.com/products/premierepro
Minnetonka
Audio Software - SurCode for Dolby Digital
www.minnetonkaaudio.com
www.surcode.com
Get Adobe Premiere Pro
from Amazon for only $799
Upgrade
your existing Windows version of Premiere.
Get Adobe Premiere Pro Upgrade
from Amazon for only $199.
here to get a special deal on Adobe Premiere
Pro from B&H Photo Video
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Technology®
Copyright 1999-2004, Douglas
Dixon, All Rights Reserved
Manifest Technology is a
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