CS3 and Friends
The next big upgrade to Adobe's Premiere Pro is out and it's not alone. Premiere Pro CS3 represents a major move toward providing a total video production workflow solution (Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium) by including copies of Encore, OnLocation, Device Central and Bridge.
While there are certainly some welcomed improvements to Premiere, the real news of this upgrade is what surrounds it. Adobe clearly wants us to now think in terms of a unified software system. But since the fundamental component of this bundle is still the timeline editor, we're going to start our review with a look at what's new in Premiere.
Premiere Proper
Compared to the jump from Adobe Premiere CS to CS2 (see July 2006 Videomaker), the number of improvements Adobe has made to the core Premiere program in CS3 is rather low. The quality of those improvements, however, is very high. The big ones include Mac compatibility, variable-rate slow motion that produces an incredibly fluid effect, multiple project panels with improved search and organizing functions, and several editing and audio refinements.
It's been a long time coming, but Mac users can now slice and dice with Mac OS X v.10.4.9 and newer, as long as it is running on a multi-core Intel processor. Boot Camp is required only for OnLocation.
The new slow motion capabilities are easy to use and produce stellar results. You simply place a clip on the timeline, select Time Remapping from the Clip Effect menu and, by adding keyframes, you can smoothly increase or slow a clip's frame rate, even to the point of freezing a frame or reversing direction. The clip automatically gets larger or smaller on the timeline. Results from our first test looked similar to video shot with a high-speed camcorder and post processed with dedicated hardware. Sure, it's true that overall sharpness isn't comparable to that achieved with a dedicated high-speed system, but the new way Premiere is handling temporal interpolation is incredible. Can you tell that we were impressed?
As projects get larger, finding and organizing assets quickly become more challenging. You can now search for a file or effect by simply starting to type in the name, and the assets matching that text string will become narrowed as you continue to enter text. This will not be a surprise for Mac users; however, PC editors will quickly wonder how they ever lived without it. You can now organize your assets by views by separating out panels, each displaying clip information differently, say, both as a list and thumbnails.
Working with audio and video in Premiere is now a little faster. Tracks nested in various sequences can now be played back without rendering. If you get Premiere as part of the Production Premium Bundle, you'll also have direct integration with Adobe's new audio editing program, Soundbooth. Look for more about Soundbooth in an upcoming issue of Videomaker.
Replacing a video clip in your timeline, while retaining that file's properties, is now just a drag-and-drop operation. Very handy if you want to experiment with a few different takes.
We ran Premiere through both simple and complex editing sessions. No sweat for the simple cuts-only session. We then loaded a 17-minute project that had dozens of various transitions, motion effects, graphics, titles and audio, some layered 7 deep. Again, no problems in either the creation or rendering once we got the kinks out of our hardware. We compared the render times with CS3 with the identical project in CS2 and did not see any marked difference in speed.
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