Adobe Premiere 4.0 makes video editing easy

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Video editing is not exactly for the fainthearted. However, if you're equipped with good video editing software, such as Premiere 4.0 from Adobe, MediaStudio from Ulead, and Razor 2.0, from In:sync, plus a very fast and powerful machine, a lot of RAM and a fast, high capacity hard disk, you, too, can master the complex but engaging art of assembling a movie.

You'll definitely need a fast machine because video editing is processor-intensive. You'll need a lot of RAM because it will improve your system's performance. You'll need a large and fast hard disk because video clip files are typically very large. And, yes, you'll also need a large display monitor, otherwise, the previewed clip would become so tiny that you wouldn't be able to see it properly. Finally, you'll need a sound card and a pair of decent stereo speakers to listen to the audio part of your movie.

Adobe Premiere 4.0 is definitely one of the best video editing tools available for the PC platform today. It has won several computer magazine awards, and I believe it was the software that really started the video editing revolution for the PC, something that only Mac users could do just a few years ago.

I was extremely lucky to have a very good tutor, who helped get me started in learning the steps in editing video clips and creating my own movie. He really made my learning curve short. If you're already a pro, you'll have much less difficulty mastering the software. I played around with Premiere 4.0 on a 90 MHz Pentium that had 40 MB of RAM and a 2 GB SCSI hard disk in it.

Deluxe version

Adobe Premiere is not a low-cost software package. However, once you get to know how to use it, you'll agree with me that, with the rich inventory of all sophisticated tools it provides, the software is actually very inexpensive, even at the list price of US$ 695.

If you're serious about video editing and you really want to learn to use Premiere, I suggest that you buy the Deluxe CD version. The CD-ROM contains not only the full package of Premiere 4.0 and a handsome collection of video and audio clips that you can use for practicing, but also Adobe Photoshop 2.5 LE, Adobe Type Manager (ATM) 3.0, some very versatile expert tips, and several sample movies. You can even read Premiere's manual on screen with the help of Adobe Acrobat.

The manual itself deserves a special recognition, as it also provides tutorial for those of us who want to know a little bit about the basics of digital video technology. It tells us, for instance, how the video camera interprets color, how the video signals are captured and then displayed, and what the SMPTE timecode means. It doesn't contain any detailed or technical explanation, but it gives us a brief and good overview; it's apparently meant for us to read quickly so that at least we have some idea of what we're doing.

While Premiere allows us to capture video data directly into it, we can also work with video and audio data -- usually called clips -- that are already saved as files. Premiere can work with Video for Windows .AVI files as well as QuickTime for Windows .MOV files.

Projects

We start creating our own movie by starting a new Project in Premiere. Each project has to be assigned a preset, depending on what we want to do. There are presets for outputting to videotape and for mastering a CD. There is even a preset for remixing audio clips only. So, when we click on the File menu item, and then New, we have to select the appropriate preset so that we have the correct time base, frame rate, compression methods, preview options and output options for our project. Presets can be modified as necessary.

Starting a new project will give us five blank windows: The Construction window, the Project window, the Transitions window, the Preview window, and the Info window. You can see the first four of them in the accompanying picture.

In the Project window, we can gather all the clips that we want to use in our editing project. The clips can contain digitized video, digitized audio, scanned images or slides, Adobe Photoshop files, animation, filmstrips exported from Premiere and edited in Photoshop, and titles. When we double-click on the blank area of the Project window, the Import dialog box will appear, and we'll be able to choose whatever clip file we want to place in it. The Project window is more like a temporary storage bin. Premiere doesn't actually import the files, however, as they can be very large in size sometimes. It just keeps track of where these files are stored. A thumbnail representation will appear next to the file name; if it is a video clip, we'll see the first frame in it.

Once we finish putting all the necessary clips in the Project window, we can place them -- by dragging and dropping with the mouse -- into the Construction window, one at a time. This window, which you can see in the top right hand corner of the accompanying picture, consists of several tracks. In the picture, two tracks are provided for video clips, one track for transition effects, one track for superimposed clips, two tracks for audio clips, and still another track for superimposed audio clip. If necessary, we can add more tracks, as Premiere supports up to 99 video tracks, 97 of which are for superimposed videos.

Special effects

Once a video clip has been placed on the Construction window, thumbnail pictures will appear on the track so that we know where it starts and where it ends. In the illustration, I placed three different video clips in the Construction window, and I placed them in such a way that they more or less followed each other in sequence. They intentionally overlapped a little, and I dragged transition effects into the position in which they overlapped.

Premiere comes with 75 different transition effects that we can choose from, such as Additive Dissolve and Cross Zoom.

We can also control the volume of each audio track independently, so that the transition between two audio tracks can be smooth. A voice over audio clip can be added to the third audio track.

Once we've assembled all the clips, we can preview the movie. For further refinement, Premiere also provided tools for editing individual clips, such as cropping individual frames to get rid of video imperfection. There are also filters that we can use to add special effects, such as darkening or lightening of the images.

The final step in creating our movie consists of compiling all the clips and effects that we've assembled in the Construction window. This is done by clicking on the Make Movie menu item. The process takes a lot of time, depending on the performance of the PC that we use.

Once the movie is compiled, we can preview it on the screen, or output it onto video tape. We can also import it into other software programs that support Video for Windows or QuickTime for Windows. We can also create MPEG files, using the REALmagic Producer MPEG compression board that I reviewed some time ago. The possibilities are endless.

Sheer fun

Like desktop publishing, video editing can let you have a lot of fun, too, because it allows you to play around and follow your creative instinct. The range of tools that are available in Premiere 4.0 are incredible but intimidating at the same time.

This software's strongest point lies in the precision by which it handles clips, and yet the user hardly has to interfere with the procedures. In almost everything we do, Premiere lets us preview the results first before making it permanent.

There's still so much to learn about desktop video editing and the field is moving forward so fast, but I'm already so impressed by what we can do with the help of Premiere 4.0. If you're into this new breed of application, you should also try it out.