Adobe Premiere 4.0 makes video editing easy

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.