Product Reviews

Aggressive bundling deals with hardware makers in the last few years have led to Premiere being the most widely used video editing program on both Mac and Windows platforms at prosumer level. Now that we no longer need dedicated capture hardware to get video in and out of our systems, Adobe has to sell Premiere off the shelf, and it faces some tough competition, particularly from Apple's Final Cut Pro.

Premiere 6.5's installation comes on two discs, one with the program, while the other sports Sonic Desktop's SmartSound QuickTracks music plug-in. Cleaner EZ is not included as this was recently sold to Discreet, but the package does feature TC Works' Spark LE.

Installed under Mac OS X on an iMac 800MHz, Premiere 6.5 worked like a charm with various DV camcorders and decks via FireWire. Captured files are immediately represented in the clip bin as thumbnail icons - these can be arranged in sequence as a storyboard and dragged to the timeline en masse. The timeline can hold up to 99 video and 99 audio tracks, all of which feature rubber-band controls for setting video transparency or audio levels over time. Multiple timeline tracks make such fundamental editing techniques as insert editing and audio splitting a snap far easier than with more basic interfaces, iMovie 2, for example. There's also a small but very effective trimming window for precise fine-tuning of edits.

Transition season

Premiere 6.5 boasts a very impressive selection of transitions, video effects and motion filters. Its effects and compositing tools aren't nearly as extensive as Final Cut Pro's, but they'll be more than enough for most

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video editors. Colour correction tools are very useful, as are simple fades and dissolves, but the wilder effects should be used sparingly.

The collection of After Effects filters has been increased to 30, and these are configured using the Effects control panel. The first big addition to the program's toolkit is the well-featured Title Designer, which sports basic drawing tools for creating geometric shapes and paths around which text can warp. Titles may be static, scrolling or crawling, and can be designed against a video frame or chequered transparency. A good range of ready-made title templates is available, as is sophisticated control over type.

The next big improvement is the introduction of real-time previewing for effects and transitions. This only applies to viewing on the computer monitor, and isn't as elegant as using hardware acceleration. All effects must still be rendered before the edit is sent back to tape, but it does give an immediate idea of how the things will look. As more effects are added to a sequence, the frame rate and quality of on-screen preview goes down, but it's still a great feature.

Controlled output to DV tape works like a dream, and there's good control over creating QuickTime files on the hard drive. However, output options seem a little mean considering that the Windows version also features direct MPEG encoding to DVD, SVCD and VCD standards, as well as encoding tools for Windows Media and RealVideo. RealProducer Basic is thrown in, but it's not compatible with OS X.

Version 6.5 boasts some welcome enhancements, but they address shortcomings that should have been looked at long ago. There's also a growing discrepancy between Mac and Windows versions. There could be more plug-ins for Windows, or more competition in the Windows market, but, either way, the Mac version feels like a poor relation. There's not enough here to merit an upgrade from 6.0, but it could tempt those still using version 5.

While Premiere is not the most intuitive DV editing package around, the £300 price gulf between it and Final Cut Pro - plus a well-established user base sharing knowledge in online communities - will keep the program popular for some time to come.