Adobe Premiere 6.5-MAC

Premiere 6.5's editing screen consists of a number of free-floating windows that contain such tools as a video preview and the all-important timeline and storyboard. The basic operation of Premiere is to load in a series of video clips taken from a camera or a CD, or previously stored on your hard drive, and then drag and drop icons for them onto the timeline. You can then add a soundtrack, transitions, effects, and titles. When all is complete, export the finished video in a format suitable for use on a DVD, Video CD, or for the Internet.

Premiere 6.5 introduces several new features, the most useful of which is probably real-time preview. The ability to see the edits you've made to your video before you render the final version is a huge timesaver. While this feature has previously been available using special hardware, this is the first time it's been available from within the software. You need a fairly powerful Macintosh to take full advantage of the real-time preview. You'll also need a computer with two hard drives, one to hold Premiere and the other for your video files.

Being able to add well-designed titles can make the difference between an amateur and a professional production. Adobe's new Title Designer, included in Premiere 6.5, provides many of the tools users of Illustrator and Photoshop will recognize to add text, rules, and shapes as overlays to videos. Adobe has bundled 90 fonts with Premiere 6.5, selected to produce clear and attractive titles.

Adobe produces a series of effects plug-ins that can be used with Premiere (sold separately as After Effects). Five of these effects (channel blur, blend, lightning, ramp, and twirl) are now included standard with Premiere 6.5, adding to the appeal of this very attractive package. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Product Description
An essential tool for professional digital video editing, Adobe Premiere 6.5 delivers unmatched hardware support. Work more productively with real-time preview, and take advantage of sophisticated, new Adobe Title Designer, MPEG-2 export, DVD authoring, powerful audio tools, and more, to create extraordinary video productions. Whether you want to edit digital video on your laptop or work with multiple layers of analog footage on a professional, hardware-based, real-time system, Adobe Premiere is a comprehensive desktop video-editing solution.

Premiere 6.5 offers powerful and precise editing tools to create broadcast-quality video productions. Use real-time preview to instantly view effects, transitions, titles, motion, and transparency. Drag and drop clips in the storyboard to quickly lay out projects and rearrange as necessary. Use new Adobe Title Designer to create broadcast-quality title sequences. View all project settings in one convenient location with the settings viewer. Work with hundreds of predefined text and object styles, or create your own custom styles.

Premiere 6.5 supports a wide range of DV devices, including Sony DVCAM gear and the latest camcorders and decks. Use DV device controls for pre-editing tasks before bringing clips into Adobe Premiere. Enjoy native support for Mac OS X, and easily move projects between the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Finally, output your video productions to DVD and other leading video formats.

Premiere 6.5's editing screen consists of a number of free-floating windows. Premiere tools are video preview, timeline and storyboard. The floating palettes has additional features that help you monitor, modify, and enhance your work. You can hide and rearrange the palettes to organize your workspace. Premiere has a new feature allowing for the insertion of hyperlinks to your video.

Familiar Adobe environment

Premiere will look familiar if you've worked with other Adobe applications. The command menus at the top of the screen, windows to perform your assembling and editing, the toolbox, and the floating palettes. The Premiere toolbox contains tools for selecting, editing, and viewing your clips.

Useful Improvements

Adobe Premiere 6.5 adds useful improvements to its digital-video editing application. This includes real-time preview and a title designer. Premiere can take video input directly from digital and analog video cameras and store it on your hard drive. You can edit it, and output to a variety of video formats, including MPEG-1.

Project Window

Listed in the Project window are all the clips that you import into your project from video, still image, sequence, and audio. Every project has only one Project window; if you close this window, you close the project. The Project window is customizable, so that you can sort and view your clips.

Wide variety of capture options. The capture interface allows you to control the camera directly. When you find points you want to capture, you simply punch-in and punch-out on the video to select.

Premiere allows you to use the television as a monitor. This makes it so you can see your work on a bigger screen and allows the hardware codec in your camera to do the display work. Connect your camera through your FireWire/IEEE 1394/iLink port to my iMac and then connect the analog A/V connectors to a television set.

One of the simplest is the way Premiere handles transitions. Just place the transition between the clips and it handles the transition automatically.

Audio Mixer. This feature allows you to adjust sound levels as the audio and video tracks are playing. DV support is native in Adobe Premiere 6.5, providing built-in support for all types of DV devices. New tools, such as the professional-level Audio Mixer and the innovative Automate to Timeline feature, encourage creativity and experimentation.

Closes the DV to Web gap.

Web export plug-ins for one-step Web output. The save for web method lets you output multiple files optimized for streaming or progressive download in popular formats including QuickTime, RealMedia, Windows Media, MPEG and others by exporting the timeline directly into a special version of Terran Interactive Media Cleaner software.

Final Notes

A simple and powerful video editing tool, Adobe Premiere a great choice for any skill level. It is easy enough to use for anyone wanting to put a nice touch on their home-produced movies. Adobe Premiere 6.5 does everything a professional grade program like Final Cut can do for less money. The depth of features makes it a great tool for the video editor who needs to make a professional quality production.