AAUG Reviews

by Dave Enders, AAUG Member

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is a suite of three programs: Premiere Pro, Encore and OnLocation. I have to admit when I first saw the package I was overwhelmed by its weight. I guess we have have got used to electronic downloads and manuals as pdf. Included in the package was a video tutorial disk. These are presented in Flash. I found the videos a good alternative to the heavy lifting required for the manuals. What I found to be distracting was the aspect ration of the video within the flash player appeared to be incorrect which resulted in the text being a bit fuzzy. I was able to go through the videos for the purpose of this review. It is noteworthy that the training videos are from Adobe and from Lynda.com. It very well maybe worthwhile acquiring a subscription to online training when you are dealing with complex programs offered by Adobe, Apple et al. What I liked that none of the training sections were longer than 10 minutes. They showed the power of Premiere, Encore and OnLocation. Total Training also offers online training for the Adobe family of products.

Lets get on with the software programs. Premiere and Encore are native Mac OS X apps. I tested these under OS X 10.5.5 on an iMac Intel Core Duo 2 2.8 Ghz, 500GB, 4GB. I found my computer to be up to the task. I was using a Sony TRV-33 DV camera. For DV and HDV, Adobe states the hard drive requirements to be a dedicated 7200 rpm drive. For HD video, the requirements get steeper requiring a RAID 0 setup with a SCSI subsystem preferred. I was thankful I was editing DV. For HD video you will probably find yourself investing in a MacPro and a lot of external storage. It is good to see though that we can use a higher end program on an iMac with a minimal investment in a good external drive. I tested with a Western Digital FW800 7200 rpm 500GB drive. I paid abut $125 for this drive.

Premiere Pro is a non-linear editing system. It is definitely a step up from iMovie & iDVD that we all have more than likely cut our teeth on. I would also have to say that it is above Final Cut Press as well. It should be as well since the price point is higher. Premiere Pro CS3 is more on the level of Final Cut Studio. Since I am a self declared Apple Fanboy, why would I look to use an Adobe product rather than the one marketed by the boys in Cupertino ? Well here a few reasons: tight integration to other Adobe products like Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator and cross platform compatibility . If you are working as a team you can open projects created on a Windows box and vice versa. The interfaces across the Adobe products are similar and all can utilize Adobe Bridge to manage your files.

I found the interface to be very well laid out very well. Adobe calls the layouts Workspaces, they include some defaults but you can customize to your hearts content and when you get it the way you want you can save it for future use.

Importing media into Premiere is accomplished using Adobe Bridge, by dragging directly to the Premiere icon or file dialog . I remember when Bridge was first introduced and didn’t quite understand the point. Working with Premiere and other Adobe applications you will learn to like Bridge. It brings all your different forms of media right to fingertips. You can even create filters to specify certain criteria based on metadata etc to find what you are looking for in an organized fashion. Premiere has a feature called Dynamic Linking. It allows you to import After Effects material without having to render it. This allows you to use it in Premiere , make adjustments in After Effects. When you are pleased your effect, you can render and replace the dynamic link effect. This eliminates the need to render small changes each time saving time in the process. A new feature in Premiere is that when you press the tilde key in any window, it toggles full screen on and off. I found this to be a nice feature especially if you are working with a smaller monitor. Flex bins are another neat features that you can have displayed on a secondary monitor leaving more space for your timeline window editing. Premiere can export to many formats including Flash, Quicktime in formats for our iPods and cell phones. With Adobe Device Central you can preview and make changes as necessary for the portable device to maximize the screen resolution.

Clip Notes is a feature in Premiere that allows you to send your video out to be reviewed. You can choose to embed the video or stream it. Embedding the video can create a very large file. If you stream the file , you specify the url with the file location. As the person reviews they can add their comments as the wish. When you receive the comments back, you import them into Premiere. You can then see exactly where in the video they thought there should be changes and by who entered the comments. Color correction is a snap with in Premiere. The feature I think I liked the most is the speeding up of video and slowing down the video to create enhancement to the video that was imported. Titles and numerous video effects are built into Premiere. They are simple to incorporate once you have your timeline setup.

Encore allows you to produce professional looking DVDs. You can export from Premiere to Encore. The chapter markers that you have defined in Premiere become dvd chapter markers in the final DVD. With Encore you make a DVD without traditional menus and make a looping video suitable for a kiosk etc. Encore is capable of authoring Blu-Ray discs. I do not have a Blu-Ray writer and the drives and media are still too expensive. Look for these prices to drop now that it is the standard. There are rumors Apple will adopt Blu-Ray in the next version of the OS.

OnLocation is a Windows application. Adobe clearly states that this can be executed using Boot Camp. I have Boot Camp installed and can report that the program ran fine. I did have to finagle with the DV camera firewire connection. What worked perfectly in Leopard did not work in Windows XP. I ended up connecting my camera directly to my iMac to get XP to recognize the camera. I think this is enough of a reason to run OS X. The marketed advantage to using Onlocation is that it allows you to instantly see the video being recorded. There are tools for color correction, to snap frames of video and digital video recorders to record the video. There are many other devices included with OnLocation. I did not experiment with them all but the ones I did worked as expected. I wanted to make sure I could record video and snap photos and get them from the Windows platform into Premiere on the Mac side. I hope Adobe looks to make a native version of OnLocation for the Mac. Calibrate the field monitor. This does not calibrate the camera itself.

I look forward to continuing learning to use Premiere Pro CS3 and will probably invest in some Total Training and Lynda.com videos in the future. As with most of Adobe’s products, they are available as 30 day trials. What better way to checkout if the software will work for you. Even though my DV camera is a few years old , Adobe has updated Premiere to include the latest HD cameras including those from Sony.

Of note , the Adobe CS4 suite is to be announced 9/23/08. We will have to wait and see what improvements Adobe makes to an already excellent product. I have read that OnLocation is now a Mac native application. Lets hop Adobe made a great application even better in version CS4