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A New Premiere

May 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Native HDV editing, improved color correction, and better encoding debut in Premiere Pro 2.0.

Unless you've been under a rock for the last few months, you've undoubtedly heard about the high-profile new features in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. (If not, visit digitalcontentproducer.com for more.) These include the new clutter-free interface, four-camera multicam editing, DVD authoring on the timeline, and improved Adobe integration. You've probably also seen the initial reviews, which are almost universally glowing, and for good reason; Premiere Pro 2.0 and the entire Adobe Production Suite are significant steps forward in terms of ease of use, features, and interoperability.

Given that you probably already know the high-level story, this article discusses some lesser known features and improvements in Premiere Pro 2.0 that you may not be aware of. Let's start with one of the most important — improved HDV down-sampled quality.

Native HDV

Most of the HDV video we shoot is for SD output, so an editor's ability to produce high-quality SD output from an HDV source is essential. Unfortunately, with Premiere Pro 1.5, which converted all HDV video into an intermediate format for editing, downsampled video was often blurry, as shown in the clips above. With version 2.0, Premiere Pro started editing HDV video natively.

As you can see above, the new version produces higher sampled quality, which now equals or exceeds that produced by other editors. Along with the new multicam feature, this makes Premiere Pro 2.0 an excellent solution for HDV or multi-format multiple camera shoots, though there are some caveats. (See “Multicam Roundup: Part 1” on p. 18.)

Subclips

Subclips are smaller clip “objects” carved out of larger clips, which act just like regular clips during editing. They're invaluable during storyboarding or for identifying clips to use as B-roll and have long been available in editors like Avid Xpress Pro and Apple's Final Cut Pro. Now they're available in Premiere Pro as well.

As with most programs, creating subclips is simple: You load the master clip in the source window, select in and out points for the subclip, and then right click and choose Make Subclip. Name the clip and it appears in the project window with a unique icon, distinguishing it from master clips but otherwise identical to actual clips stored on disk. It's a subtle feature, but a timesaver and convenience in many projects.

Improved color correction

With Premiere Pro 1.5, the automatic color-correction tools lacked configurability and power, and the manual tools were complex and challenging to use. New in Premiere Pro is a Fast Color Corrector with a variety of fast correction tools and configurable split-screen preview in both horizontal and vertical axes. The first color adjustment is a simple white balance eyedropper; you just click an area in the frame that's supposed to be white, and Premiere Pro white balances the clip accordingly.

I especially liked the master Hue Balance and Angle control, with a handle providing separate controls for hue adjustment and intensity, which makes the adjustment much more intuitive. The control also provides access to Auto Black Level, Contrast, and White Level adjustments, but not brightness and contrast, which would have been useful.

For more complex adjustments, there's also a Three-Way Color Correction tool, which is a lot like the old Color Corrector tool but now includes secondary color correction. This lets you adjust the color of objects in the video, usually for artistic effect, like changing a blue car to red. Again, while this feature was available in version 1.5, the controls are more usable and refined in the new version. Note that both tools process in the 32-bit color space, which should preserve subtle colors more effectively than previous versions.

Access to noise removal

Interprogram integration is one of the loudest drums Adobe has been beating about the new release. One of the more useful integration-related features is the ability to easily access Adobe Audition's noise-removal function from the Premiere timeline. With version 1.5, you could choose Edit Original from the timeline and send the entire audio file to Audition, but not just the clip you wanted to edit. For even this to work, however, Audition had to be the default application for playing AVI files in Windows Explorer, which was awkward because generally Media Player or even the QuickTime Player is a better choice for video playback.

With version 2.0, you can select any audio clip on the timeline, right click, and choose Edit in Adobe Audition. Premiere sends just that audio clip to Audition, where you can remove noise and access all other Audition filters as well. As before, once you save the file in Audition, Premiere Pro automatically replaces the original audio file with the edited version.

As you probably have read, you can also embed unrendered Adobe After Effects projects in both Premiere Pro and Adobe Encore, with full roundtrip editing, using a technology called Dynamic Link. Unfortunately, while you can import Premiere Pro projects into After Effects, you have to render all Premiere Pro projects before importing them into Encore; you can't import unrendered Premiere Pro projects.

New lighting effects

Lighting is always challenging to get right on location or to fix in post. Adobe's Shadow/Highlight tool has been a lifesaver for me on several projects. In Premiere Pro 2.0, Adobe added a Lighting Effect filter that lets you add up to five additional lights into the video.

Lights can be directional, omni, or spotlights, and you control the location, angle, radius, intensity, color, and focus of each light. You can also adjust the color and intensity of the ambient light, as well as surface gloss and material. In addition to fixing lighting problems and creating artistic effects, the new filter shows promise as a tool for de-emphasizing the background in talking-head videos to improve compressed streaming quality.

Improved encoding controls

With previous versions of Premiere Pro, deinterlacing video bound for streaming involved setting an obscure switch on the timeline, usually once for each clip in the timeline, which literally could take hours with complicated projects. In addition, the Adobe Media Encoder was often confusing to use and lacked the ability to preview the video before encoding, a valuable diagnostic feature.

In version 2.0, Adobe revamped the Media Encoder tool, simplifying the interface, prominently placing a deinterlace button on the front of the tool with preview of source and output files. Sadly, if you enable split-screen preview during color correction, Premiere Pro still renders with the split-screen preview enabled, almost always producing a file you have to re-encode, hopefully before your client sees it. So remember to unclick the split-screen view before leaving any color-correction tool.

Some of these features may sound trivial, but they all deliver significant benefits to the Premiere Pro user, whether by saving time via more streamlined workflow or by enabling higher quality, more creative output.Though Premiere Pro 2.0 isn't perfect, it's a significant improvement over 1.5 that more than justifies the upgrade price, and as a standalone tool, it now competes favorably with similarly priced products from Apple, Avid, and Sony.

To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer staff at dcpfeedback@prismb2b.com.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.