Product Reviews

Premiere 6.5 is the final Adobe package to make the leap to Mac OS X, so MacUser apprehended a pre-release copy to see what delights Adobe had parcelled up with its mid-market video editor.

It's way past time for Premiere to be OS X compatible, and in keeping with this lateness, version 6.5 doesn't trumpet the feature. Instead, OS X compatibility is slipped in as a 'by the way' bonus among the other highlights. Reassuringly for switched-on video professionals, Premiere integrates well with QuickTime 6, which adds the MPEG-4 compressor to the standard list of export formats and means that MPEG-4 format video and audio can be exported ready for DVD burning. Unfortunately, our pre-release version only came bundled with QuickTime 5.0.2.

The most outstanding new feature of Premiere 6.5 is the real-time editing, a feature already present in Apple's Final Cut Pro 3. Unlike Final Cut Pro, Premiere makes all its edits, effects, titles and transitions available for real-time previewing as well, including the more complex animations, such as motion paths and titling. After working with the real-time feature for a few hours, we were left wondering how we managed without it: real-time editing is a huge leap forward. The ability to layer transitions and effects together for composite effect previewing is particularly impressive.

Speed limits

As always with real-time video editing, the faster your Mac, the higher the playback fidelity. A 500MHz Power Mac is the realistic minimum specification you could use, but in return the frame rate and quality would be dramatically degraded. To improve performance, just reduce the screen resolution. On a Power Mac 1GHz DP, the previews run as smooth as silk.

After the real-time editing and OS X compatibility, the next best thing about Premiere 6.5 is its new Title Designer window. This is easily as sophisticated as most standalone titling applications. The Title Designer allows titles, rolls or crawls to be created, or more than 170 preset templates to be modified (see Title Designer, p43). Premiere 6.5 includes around 90 Adobe PostScript fonts for use in the Title Designer. Clearly, the fonts have been chosen with care for a heavy face weight and balanced x-heights, attributes that work well in motion titling, but there are some oddities: Zapfino, Eccentric and Fette Faktur are all too spidery or overly detailed.

Adobe's customer research has identified that 50% of Premiere's user base plan to write DVDs in 2002. The Windows version of Premiere 6.5 will bundle software to do this, most notably Adobe's MPEG Encoder and Sonic's DVDit! LE, which facilitate exporting MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files for DVD authoring and DVD burning. However, the Mac version doesn't come with this software. Instead, you will have to buy Apple's DVD Studio Pro, which includes a QuickTime export module for creating MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files (if you only want to use MPEG-4 files, you can

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just get QuickTime 6). DVD Studio Pro costs around £800, hardly encouraging for Mac users wanting to burn DVDs.

Hardware support has been maintained from Premiere 6.0, so those who invested in third-party capture cards can still use them. The list of device-control supported camcorders and decks has grown by around 15% and now covers all Sony's DV-CAM devices and even storage peripherals, such as the Sony SRA-DU1 DV hard drives.

Sound level

Sound editing in Premiere has always been slightly behind its video editing capability. The introduction of the Audio Mixer in version 6.0 was welcome, but not enough to satisfy users who wanted to do more than blend, pan and gain. Version 6.5 is an improvement as it includes Spark LE, TC Works' two-track sound editor, which allows mixing, and basic and wave editing.

Spark LE is sparse on advanced audio editing features, but like Premiere's video editing feature, it works in real time. Unfortunately, the Mac version is again the poor relative to the Windows version, which comes bundled with TC Works' DirectX plug-ins Reverb, EQ and Dynamics. These combine to give a much more sophisticated mix of audio sweetening and optimising functions.

There are some welcome extras with Premiere 6.5, including an updated bundling of SmartSound Quicktracks, Sonic Desktop's sound creator package. Quicktracks works using source tracks that contain a base music track, for example, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played by an orchestra consisting of a string quartet, jazz flutes, funk guitars and a Hammond B3. The base track is played with a series of embedded digital 'hooks'. The SmartSound Maestro manipulates these based on user-specified parameters to produce a piece of music in a particular style, making Quicktracks an excellent way to create music, even if you lack musical ability or knowledge of composition. Eleven updated Quicktracks source tracks cover classical, blues, pop-rock, grunge, Motown, new age, techno and cyberspace styles.

Get smart

Particularly useful is the SmartSound track, which automatically integrates with a project, so changing a track's length is simply a matter of entering a new duration through the Timeline. SmartSound's keying to Premiere is a subject all of its own. For tips and tutorials, try the excellent Premiere World-Wide User Group at www.wwug.com/forums/adobe_premiere/index.htm.

Other freebies include some new effects ported from After Effects. The Blend transition offers crossfades, and transitions based on colour, tint, lightness or darkness. Channel Blur creates glow effects by blurring the red, green, blue or alpha channels of a clip. Lightning creates bolts of lightning, while Ramp blends colour gradients with a clip using keyframes - the Ramp Scatter control disperses colours to avoid banding, so creating broadcast-quality results. You can transfer effect plug-ins from the After Effects effects folder to the equivalent folder in Premiere. Adobe has extended the list of compatible plug-ins to include Colour Balance, Compound Blur, Gamma/Pedestal Gain and Beam, while Pro Bundle users can transfer Offset, Corner Pin, Displacement Map, Glow and Scatter.

There's no disputing that Mac users are not as well served as Windows users by Premiere 6.5. For Mac users, the attraction will lie in its OS X compatibility and real-time editing. This could almost be a full upgrade: as it stands, Premiere 6.5 is superb value for money. Let's hope that Mac DVD authoring and burning make it into version 7.