Product Reviews

Adobe Premiere has been the natural choice for professional video editing on a PC for many years, but today it faces stiff competition from Sony Vegas and Pinnacle Edition. The program saw a radical overhaul last year in the form of Premiere Pro, and the 1.5 suffix and reasonable upgrade price of this latest release (£81 for Premiere Pro users, £199 from earlier versions) suggest that this is more of an interim update.

Those thinking about buying it for the first time will get a vastly better deal if they buy a hardware system that bundles it. Matrox's RT.X10 Suite includes Premiere Pro 1.5, the latest versions of Adobe's DVD-authoring and audio-editing programs, Encore DVD and Audition, plus a PCI card that accelerates Premiere's real-time previews, all for a tenner less than Premiere costs on its own.

Adobe products often benefit from cross-pollination of ideas and most of the new features in 1.5 are taken from elsewhere. New video effects come straight from Photoshop: Auto Levels, Auto Color and Auto Contrast provide effective instant colour correction, while Shadow/Highlight, first seen in Photoshop CS, is great for revealing detail in dark and light areas of footage.

After Effects has donated its Bezier motion control capabilities. Video elements can be panned around onscreen using keyframes as before, but Bezier curves now allow the user to define paths more precisely, and the results are smoother too. There are options to ease in, ease out and hold between keyframes but, while setting up curves is easy, going back and adjusting them can get messy.

Integration with other Adobe software has seen further improvements, with the ability to cut and paste directly between Premiere and After Effects, and compatibility with the latter's plug-ins. Photoshop CS's support for non-square pixels will be welcomed

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by video editors, and you can now work on images simultaneously in both programs, with live updates between the two. Project management tools assist integration with any editing platform as well as backups, with the ability to pack a video project with all its associated files into a single folder and the option to discard or truncate unused or partially used files. Export and import of AAF and EDL project files and HD video make taking projects to and from Avid systems easier than ever.

Not all the new features draw their inspiration from Adobe's product line-up. The ability to capture and edit low-resolution video then re-import and compile a high-resolution edit is something Pinnacle has offered for years, even in its low-cost Studio software. Three new effects that call on the graphics card's processor is another idea Pinnacle had first. These 3D effects look impressive, but are too gimmicky for most projects.

You can now save custom presets of effects settings. Vegas has had this for years, but Premiere does it better. Keyframe-animated settings are saved too, allowing complex morphing effects to be saved to a Favorites folder. Vegas can do this by copying attributes between objects but can't save them for use in other projects.

Vegas still remains unchallenged for audio manipulation. Premiere Pro added plenty of new features in this area, including surround mixing, track-based effects and VST support, and 1.5 goes further still with sample-level editing, but complex audio edits are fiddly and time-consuming compared with Vegas.

In fact, even for the most straightforward editing tasks such as slicing, fading and moving around the timeline, Vegas is faster to use. Premiere relies on its toolbox and Effects palette for jobs Vegas can handle directly on the timeline, and this swiftness of operation gives Vegas a significant advantage for everyday use. Premiere is better for highly complex effects animations, thanks to its ability to set separate keyframes for every parameter rather than just for each effect. Its use of nested sequences also helps complex projects, as it allows intricate edits to be packed away in their own timeline to keep the main one tidy.

We still prefer Vegas's streamlined core controls and equally advanced capabilities, even for ambitious productions but, while Premiere seems a little overpriced on its own, as part of a Matrox bundle it is fantastic value.