Product ReviewsMultimedia software
While the biggest news with Premiere is its restoration to the Mac platform, Adobe has still seen fit to update the Windows edition at the same time. Apart from the CS3 splash screen, the app looks identical, but there are a number of welcome additions behind the scenes. One of the main highlights is the Time Remapping ability - something Avid Liquid has had for a while. You can now speed up sections of a clip, freeze frames in the middle, or even make a clip play forwards and backwards, all using a timeline rubber band and a few mouse clicks. The control system is simple to understand when you've figured out how the two-part keyframes work. Another useful new feature is clip replacement: if you regularly reuse old projects but with new media, this will speed up your workflow no end. You can swap one clip on the timeline for another in the bin, but maintain all filters and editing settings you applied to the original piece of footage. Although you could save filter presets and apply these to a new clip, the new facility is much quicker. Even more prosaic, but similarly useful, is the ability to open multiple instances of the Project window, making dragging assets between bins much easier than before. The Effects portfolio hasn't changed much since Premiere Pro 2, but the MainConcept-powered Adobe Media Encoder has been considerably improved. You can now encode H.264 as well as MPEG1 and 2, plus Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Windows Media formats. You can create Blu-ray-compatible files in both MPEG2 and H.264 formats, with a comprehensive set of presets for either. Portable devices are well catered for too, with Windows Media presets for Zune, Creative Zen Vision and Palm handhelds. The H.264 options include iPod, 3GPP and Sony PSP integrated with Adobe's Device Central. Premiere
Although Clip Notes were available in Premiere Pro 2, Adobe has made them much easier to locate as an Export option under the File menu. There's a new Export to Encore option too. You're given the choice between a video-only or menu-driven disc. Both load Encore and use it to burn the disc, but where the former automatically takes you through encoding to the prompt for blank media to be inserted, the latter opens the authoring environment. We've always liked Premiere's logical video-editing interface, but the spiralling price had made it look poor value compared with Avid Liquid's excellent built-in DVD authoring. This time around, Adobe's masterstroke is getting Encore and OnLocation CS3 in the box and still charging less than the previous version. OnLocation & Encore The beta of OnLocation shows great promise - we'll bring you a full review once we've seen the final code. But Encore hasn't changed much in its transition to CS3: the headline feature is support for Blu-ray - and not just MPEG2-based discs. Projects can be at 720 x 576, 1,280 x 720, 1,440 x 1,080 and 1,920 x 1,080, with interlaced fields or progressive frames. But, best of all, the H.264 codec can be used to fit more video onto a disc. Dolby Digital sound and automatic transcoding at 15Mb/sec up to 40Mb/sec are also available. You can even create a Blu-ray project and burn to DVD or Flash SWF from the Build tab. With OnLocation and the feature-rich Encore CS3 disc-authoring tool included in the box, Premiere Pro CS3 is good value already, even if you don't buy it as part of Production Premium CS3. It's expensive compared with Avid Liquid 7, but for professional video editors it represents a complete package for taking your content from camcorder to disc or the web. For existing Premiere Pro users, the £203 upgrade looks like a particularly tempting deal as well. By James Morris SPECIFICATIONS:
Requires Windows XP SP2/ Vista |
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