Product Reviews

Recently, rumours abounded that version 6 might be the last ever edition of Premiere, and that 7 would never see the light of day. The latter may still be open to discussion, but we're definitely halfway there, as 6.5 has just hit the streets.

With Pinnacle's Edition DV (see Reviews, issue 94, p149) offering stiff competition at the standalone end of Premiere's market, Adobe needed to incorporate some industrial-strength features to keep it from being relegated to hardware bundles only.

Premiere 6.5's most fundamental new feature in this effort is Software Real-Time. This provides an instant preview of edits, effects, titles and transitions on your desktop monitor, allowing the kind of workflow previously only experienced with hardware such as Matrox's RT range, and then only for a subset of effects. Adobe even promises output via your FireWire adaptor and a DV device to an external video monitor. However, you'll need to enable Software Real-Time under the Keyframe and Rendering project settings.

Presets are only supplied for PAL and NTSC DV. The Enter key then switches function to start timeline playback with Software Real-Time, which will do its best to render effects and transitions depending on the processing power of the host PC.

Software Real-Time doesn't mean an end to rendering, as video doesn't play back at full quality and at full frame rate. But it clearly has potential, as it's at the composition stage that you need instant feedback - full-resolution rendering can be done later.

Pinnacle Edition provides faster fully rendered previews via background rendering, but you still have to wait to see an edit you've just done. Which solution you prefer depends on the kind of editing you're doing. Where getting back out to tape as quickly as possible is the main objective, Edition reigns supreme, but Premiere 6.5 has a strong case for more complicated composition and offers excellent instant feedback on edits.

Titling is another area where Premiere has finally received the upgrade it's been crying out for since version 4. TitleDeko and TitleExpress were bundled with Premiere 6, so perhaps it's a bit late for Premiere's new built-in titler - Adobe Title Designer. However, it's more fully featured than either of the two previous offerings, it comes with over 300 pre-designed templates and the ability to import text files, which

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will be great for long ending credits. It also offers more drawing tools for creating titles with backgrounds, and comes with more than 90 PostScript fonts.

Version 6.5 brings little in terms of extra effects capability. Five additional After Effects filters have been included - Blend, Channel Blur, Directional Blur, Ramp and Lightning - taking the total to over 30.

There are three new professional-grade audio plug-ins courtesy of TC Works. TC Reverb, TC EQ and TC Dynamics have quasi rack-mount interfaces and offer more power than the native Premiere equivalents, and a very useful selection of presets are bundled with each one. It's also pleasing to see that DirectX audio plug-ins now appear to work as they were supposed to with Premiere 6, so plug-ins intended for use with Sound Forge or Cubase, for example, should be available in Premiere.

Adobe has continued the good work on export capability begun with version 6. A new version of Advanced Windows Media Export adds support for the latest formats. You can import Windows Media files for editing too. Most important, though, is Adobe's realisation that DVD is the fundamental way to distribute video, leading to the new Adobe MPEG Encoder. This has DVD, VCD and SVCD presets, or you can create custom compression settings.

To finish things off, DVD authoring capabilities are provided via the ubiquitous Sonic DVDit! LE. That said, although Sonic's offering would have been commendable a few years ago, it now looks rather limited compared to Ulead DVD Workshop (see Reviews, issue 92, p147).

Adobe claims Premiere 6.5 is backwards-compatible with real-time editing hardware designed for use with Premiere 6, and this is borne out in practice. I installed Premiere 6.5 over the top of Premiere 6 on a system already fitted with a Matrox RT2500 and another with an RT.X100 (see p118) and carried on editing as if nothing had changed. The claim at least holds true for these cards. Unfortunately, Software Real-Time mode and its instant preview of effects wasn't available, as the hardware real-time editing mode didn't seem to support it.

From a general interface perspective, Premiere 6.5 isn't as radical a leap as version 6. The core GUI and application features appear relatively unchanged. For standalone software users, Software Real-Time will be a productivity boost, but for those who already own real-time hardware the benefits are less persuasive. Nevertheless, the addition of DVD output capability means that Premiere remains a comprehensive toolset for editing video all the way from tape back out to finished product.

Pinnacle Edition is a strong competitor for less effects-oriented narrative videomaking, but Premiere 6.5 shows that Adobe knows that the future of desktop video editing lies in a more responsive, real-time experience. I just hope Adobe works with capture card manufacturers to make this technology available as soon as possible for real-time hardware as well.