Adobe Premier Pro 1.5

Adobe has kept true to the legacy of Premiere with the latest release of their flagship nonlinear video editing product, Premiere Pro 1.5.

The target audience for this product is a director or editor or even a team of creative people working on a documentary or corporate project, or on an independent film, who have skills in this area. It is also aimed at, and used by, those of us who have high-end computer technology skills (and even some experience programming). This is one powerful product that will let you do pretty much ANYTHING you want -- anything you may have seen in any movie or television show. However, this is a steep learning curve and the user interface is not as "family friendly" as it were, as some of the products out there in the $50 to $150 range such as Microsoft's Home Movie editor or Ulead's VideoStudio. That said, it's a great product and I'd like to take the first section of this review (of many sections) to talk about three of the best new features of this release: the Project Manager, the Audio functionality, and the support of Bezier keyframes. Later in this review I'll cover more of the new enhancements and features in this release.

New Project Manager

If you've ever worked on a large project, such as an independent film or a short documentary, you know that there are LOTS of files involved. The tasks of managing file space and moving files from your machine to another machine (where someone else may be synching the music soundtrack, for example) could be, in the past, quite a task. With this release of Premiere, preparing projects for handoff is made easier thanks to the new Project Manager (see illustration). Another nice feature of the Project Manager is that it can be used to easily exclude unused clips (or portions of clips) in your movie project, thereby reducing overall project file size. You can optionally choose to have Projet Manager automatically rename media files as it copies them so that they match project clip names. This feature makes it easier to remember what's what. Finally, a great time- (and aggrevation-) saver is Project Manager's ability to let you edit offline in low resolution for speedier processing. You then copy the completed job to a new project sans the content you deleted in low-res mode, and recapture only exactly what you need in high resolution. This increases productivity by saving both time and hard-disk space.

Enhanced Audio Functionality

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 improves positioning and editing of audio clips, and also adds two important new audio effects. Precise audio editing is made easier with the addition of the Snap-on Sample option. With this option, if you edit an audio file at the individual sample level within a frame of video, you can choose to have future audio edits automatically snap to the same sample level, even when working in frame mode, ensuring exact audio alignment every time. The already rich set of audio plug-ins included with Adobe Premiere Pro has been expanded to include DeHummer and DeEsser. Important for any truly professional-sounding audio, DeHummer removes unwanted hum that can be introduced by poorly shielded cables, grounding loops, and dimmers, while it leaves all desired frequencies of your audio intact. DeEsser removes excessive sibilance, or hiss from your audio; especially useful when dealing with spoken narration and other voice-overs.

Bezier Keyframe Support

Premiere Pro 1.5 ships with new and powerful bezier controls that allow you to now achieve smoother, more natural results in motion paths. You can minutely control both the speed at which they are followed and the velocity of other effects you apply to your video projects. For example, you can smooth the path for changes in an image position by setting one or more keyframes on your path to bezier, and then simply adjusting the handles that appear in the Monitor window (see illustration). You then smooth out changes in the speed at which the image moves along that path by setting the keyframes in the Timeline window to bezier