Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 Review 
Reviewed by: Rusty Yonkers

Adobe Premiere Pro is a high end video editing tool for Microsoft Windows.  The new version, CS3, will work on both Windows and MacIntosh. This product is positioned as a competitor to Apple’s Final Cut Pro.  It is a very powerful editor with loads of features.  There is a slimmed down version, Premiere Elements, marketed for the low-end market.  This product is not for the beginner video editor though. I even hesitate to recommend Elements for the newbie on this one. 

First, you should really use a computer with as large of a monitor as you can afford.  There are a lot of things that you will want on the screen, and they all take screen space.  It is barely useable on a 1024x768 screen (although it can be done in a crunch). I would recommend a wide screen format screen if possible.  You will want the screen space left and right, especially for the timeline!  You will need a fairly decent processor, lots of memory (I used 1.5 GB), and of course you will need a large hard drive (video takes LOTS of space). 

The product will do up to 99 video tracks and 99 audio tracks.  The video tracks are like layers in Photoshop where the one above will cover up the one below unless there is alpha channel parts or the layer is semi-transparent.  The audio tracks will allow some pretty fancy audio mixing.  The timeline is really straightforward to use. You can zoom in on the timeline to get fine control and then zoom back out to see the big picture.  The wider the screen the more you can stay zoomed in. 

Once you get your video and audio laid in, you are ready to add transitions and effects.  These are all in a single area of the screen.  You just drag them onto the appropriate video or audio track.  The effects controls were a little hard to find at first until I noticed the tabs where the preview window is.  The effects are all grouped on the same tab.  This actually works out well once you find where this is.  Unless you are an experienced editor, you will have to play with the effect for a while to find what you want and how to lay it in. 

I was disappointed in some of the transitions and effects.  I took a few of the video clips out to Windows Movie Maker to put on the effect and then re-imported them.  Windows Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie seem to do much better at many of the effects. Two things I found amazingly missing were an effect to put scratches in a video (like an old film movie), and a good basic cross fade for video clips.  I believe that there are plug-ins you can get for effects and transitions, but for the $800 you are going to spend I would have expected better.  I was also disappointed at the titler.  It was very difficult to work with.  The Adobe programmers could learn a lot from Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, and Uleads editor on how to do cool titles that are easy to lay into the movie (same for the effects).  As an aside, for audio that needs a lot of work, I recommend downloading a copy of Audacity.   This is an open source free audio editor that is really good.  Some of the clips I worked on I was able to fix in Premiere.  Some were just so bad though I needed the power of Audacity.

There are a slew of additional tools for manipulating the audio and video.  It took me a while to find the razor tool as well as the tool to select all the clips from a certain point.  Once I found these tools things got much better.  I found myself going to the help file a lot.  The book was good, but the on-line help was better for the most part.  It would be nice if they gave video and audio examples of what the effects and transitions did though instead of relying on still photos or no examples.

Once you complete your video, you can export it out a number of different ways.  You can make an avi, mpeg, or quicktime movie. Supposedly with CS3 they have expanded capabilities for outputting video files to go to a number of different media devices.  You can also make a DVD. At first I did not think I could do any more than the most basic autostart DVD.  I looked in the book and suddenly found a DVD menu creation capability.  It is a little cludgy but actually makes pretty good DVDs once you get used to it.  It is like a little hidden jewel in the program.  For the project I am working on this little jewel will do just fine. 

For a really professional DVD you will probably want to use Adobe Encore to author the DVD.  The biggest issue there though is that the DVD markers that you put into the video in Premiere cannot be read by Encore.  This would be a big frustration if I used Encore. I am not completely sure how I would get the video into Encore.  I think you would export to an avi file and then import that into Encore.  Well I will let others figure that one out. 

If you are serious about doing video work on the computer, then this is definitely the product for you.  It is powerful and very capable.  If you are a newbie or just want to sling a bunch of video clips one after the other, then there are some good low-end products available.  You may want to look at the latest version of Premiere Elements because they were suppose to have added some new features to make it much easier for the casual user.  You can download a demo of either product to try out.  And here’s looking at seeing you at the next film festival.