Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 review

Less than a year has gone by since Adobe released the first version of a complete rewrite to its video-editing giant, Premiere. As part of the en masse release of new editions that make up the Digital Video Collection 2.5, Premiere Pro 1.5 builds on the codebase with a combination of new features and improved old ones.

Premiere Pro further imitates After Effects with this release, as the motion control has become even more like a compositing tool. It now supports Bezier keyframes, so that the on-screen nodes for each keyframe now have familiar little handles, allowing you to change the curve of the motion. You can also change the temporal interpolation, so that motion can ease in and out of a keyframe.

Best of all, every single effect, not just motion paths, can now be saved as a preset, with the option to anchor the frames to the in or out point, or scale them when they're applied to a new clip. Adobe also supplies a small selection of ready-made presets created by Jacob Rosenberg, an LA-based skateboard film-maker.

Photoshop integration - one of the key new features of the original Premiere Pro - has been improved as well. Photoshop luma and track mattes can be used directly in Premiere, with complete interaction between the two apps. Photoshop CS can be called directly from within Premiere, and any changes made in Photoshop are immediately registered back. Now that Photoshop CS understands non-square pixels, the correct aspect ratio will be used, which is particularly useful for 16:9 anamorphic work.

Premiere's integration with After Effects has also been taken to a new level, although you still can't import After Effects compositions for use on the timeline. However, you can copy and paste between Premiere and After Effects. Not everything gets through the process - most of Premiere Pro's filter and transition effects are left behind. Notable exceptions are the After Effects ones that now replace some of Premiere's own versions; motion paths and other motion control settings are also passed across. It's possible to call upon After Effects' more detailed control and compositing toolset, and the results can be pasted back into Premiere.

Premiere Pro now comes with a selection of one-click image adjustment filters, most of which will be familiar to Photoshop users. Auto Color, Auto Levels and Auto Contrast all improve the image in predictable ways, while Shadow/Highlight will recover the hidden detail in murky footage. The one-click filters were pretty effective with the footage we tried them on, but you can still go in and tweak them manually. They can all be keyframed too.

Premiere Pro 1.5 also includes a selection of new special effects, the most intriguing of which are the GPU effects: Page Curl, Refraction and Ripple (Circular). However, although these produce eye-catching effects similar to their equivalents in Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5, we found playback far more jerky. Waves' DeEsser and Steinberg's DeHummer VST audio effects have been added too. These remove high and low-frequency background noise.

Another major area into which Adobe is pushing Premiere Pro is as an offline editor, fitting in with higher-end systems. The improved Project Management tools allow you to reduce a project's size for archiving by cutting out the unused portions. These tools also facilitate Premiere Pro's use as an offline editor - for example, making a 16:9 DV edit of an HD project, then using the edit to reassemble an HD version. The support for exporting Avid AAF files makes Premiere even better suited to this than previously.