It's always been powerful, but now it's easy to use!
Written: Aug 31 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Ease of use, integration with other Adobe products, lots of effects to play with
Cons: Sometimes has problems with 1394 interface, and it's not cheap.
The Bottom Line: Premiere 6.0 is easy to use straight of the box! But with all the features and effects provided, this program is hard to outgrow, even for a semi-pro or pro!
Baldwyn's Full Review: Adobe Premiere 6.0 Full Version for PC
I've gone through 3 versions of Adobe Premiere to date: LE, 5.1c, and now 6.0. I wanted access to more video effects, and compositing tools, so I bought 5.1c, without using LE too much. After attending a free Adobe seminar on Premiere 6.0 and After Effects 5.0, I was sold on the new upgrade. I didn't really use LE for anything other than experimenting with; cut a small video with 5.1c (around 4 min in length), and two small videos (3-4 min in length) with 6.0 so far.
The Adobe seminar actually demonstrated the new features of Premiere 6.0 by cutting a car commercial on the spot, based on pre-captured clips. Using a sound track as a basis, the demonstrator created marks on the timeline according to the beats in the music. Then, simply, using "Automate to Timeline", these clips were applied, lined up according to the music. You instantly have a compelling edit, with shot changes synced with your soundtrack. By dragging all the clips to a Story Board window, you can arrange the clip order easily, with a visual representation right on your screen.
My two videos actually applied this technique for creating the final edit. In one case, I chose the music, and in the other case, I used the included software, specifying the type of music, and it created a license-free song for me, that worked really well. Then by marking key changes in the music, I had my shot changes. Since my captured video wasn't quite as clean as the pre-arranged shots used in the demo, I specified the in-point for the clips to start. I was extremely pleased with the results, after only an hour and a half of playing.
I've changed the speed of the clips (up to 800x faster), used brightness/contrast and hue filters to improve the appearance of a clip, a couple of the transitions for cross-fading clips, and even the compositing tools for overlaying titles (the program I used to generate my titles does not output an alpha channel for specifying the background to be transparent). Applying these effects turned out to be rather intuitive, although it does require rendering the clip to see the entire result.
As for audio, Adobe added a Audio Mixer window in this release that allows the user to have a more intuitive interface, then just the rubber bands from previous versions. I do still use the rubber banding (where you can specify the amplitude window of the audio by clicking and dragging) for fades based on clip content.
One of the main reasons I really liked the upgrade was DV capture support. I have an older Sony Digital Video workstation with a built in 1394 interface. With LE and 5.1c, I had to capture my clips using Sony's software, and then import them into Premiere. With version 6.0, I can now do this all in Premiere. However, since I only had Windows 98 before, I had to upgrade to at least Windows 98 Second Edition (I upgraded to Windows ME), in order to get Microsoft's DV capture capability. DV capture works ok for me in 6.0. However, sometimes I do have problems, such as my captured window doesn't always show the video that it's capturing. Also, exporting back, I've noticed blips on tape at the beginning. Is this due to my camera, or the software, or the computer? I'm not totally sure. I've always found ways to work around it, but do know that it's not always as seamless as advertised.
Adobe has added improved web output export in this version, and has a limited version of Cleaner bundled with the software. I haven't been totally happy with my web outputs, and the version of Cleaner doesn't allow you alot of access to all the options that the full version does. I often spend alot of time trying to figure out a combination of options that produces a satisfactory output. This may be due to my ignorance on compression techniques, and what works best for what.
I have noticed a significant performance boost based on 6.0 vs 5.1c on the same computer. The new version seems to spend less time rendering, and require less rendering as well. I have seen on 5.1c that doing a simple edit would require a long, unneccessary rendering time to view the full output, but in 6.0, a simple edit isn't being rendered at all (as it should be).
All in all, I have been able to use this product straight out of the box to produce videos that I'm totally happy with! I don't find myself wanting for features outside of the realm of a video tool; perhaps for graphics, or animations, but I don't expect Premiere to include such abilities. I believe that version 6.0 offers significant improvements and features over 5.1c, and would recommend to anyone who hasn't upgraded to do so. Adobe now offers a $199 upgrade from Adobe Premiere LE (there was no such path to 5.1c before), with the upgrade from previous full versions being $149. It also comes bundled with some firewire cards for less than the retail price ($549), so look around if you're interested in picking it up.
Prof. digital video editing Robust DV support Familiar Adobe interface, Platforms: Windows NT Windows 98 Windows 2000 Windows MeMore at Amazon Marketplace
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