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Edit Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Jan Ozer

New features and workflows for Windows and Mac.

For many markets, Adobe Premiere Pro is the dominant video editor on the Windows platform. With version CS3, Adobe is not only providing a new release for those users, but the company is also taking another crack at the Apple Macintosh market — Intel-based Mac systems to be specific. On the latter, the company is fighting both the lingering memories burned long ago by Premiere 6.5 on the Mac and the dominance of Apple Final Cut Pro.

The new Premiere Pro for the Mac is impressive, no doubt, and we'll get to that. But first, what's in it for Windows users? We'll start with an overview of the changes to Premiere Pro CS3 for Windows, then I'll review the differences between the Windows and Mac products.

The Windows story

Premiere Pro CS3 is sold as a standalone product for both Mac and Windows, as well as a component of Creative Suite 3 Production Premium ($1,699 for the full version; $799 for the upgrade). The Windows version of Premiere Pro comes with OnLocation CS3 (formerly DV Rack) and Ultra CS3 — both fruits of Adobe's 2006 acquisition of Serious Magic. Encore CS3 is now also bundled with Premiere Pro CS3, and it is no longer available as a standalone app.

Otherwise, changes to Premiere Pro are modest and mixed. Premiere's new Time Remapping effect is a very easy-to-use option for gradually changing speeds on the timeline. Operation is very simple: When you insert a keyframe into the timeline, Premiere Pro adds two — one for the starting speed of the effect (i.e., 100 percent speed) and the other for the target speed (such as 50 percent). To change from 100 percent to 50 percent speed over one second, you drag the second keyframe one second to the right. You can even customize the ramp of the speed change using blue handles that appear when the keyframes are active.

I was disappointed to see that this release drops 2d3's excellent SteadyMove video-stabilization effect, which was easy to use and produced excellent results. If you have the CS3 suite, you can use After Effects' Motion Stabilizer, but it's more labor-intensive and time-consuming than the 2d3 solution (though similar in quality). If you don't have the suite, however, you don't have an image-stabilization solution.

Also gone is the ability to produce DVDs with menus from the Premiere Pro timeline. This was a feature I originally scoffed at, but it really grew on me — primarily for simple family projects such as school assemblies and holidays, for which convenience was more important than creativity. Considering the professional audience of Premiere Pro CS3, however — and now with Encore bundled with Premiere Pro — it's tough to call this a significant shortfall.

OnLocation and Ultra

Back in the day, when broadcast-quality camcorders cost $25,000-plus, few shooters fired up their camcorders without connecting to a waveform monitor to check levels. The advent of inexpensive 3CCD DV camcorders changed this paradigm, democratizing video production forever, but it didn't eliminate the need for waveform monitors — even though many newbies didn't (and still don't) know what they are.

This is the deficit that Serious Magic DV Rack (now Adobe OnLocation) was designed to resolve, and it does a great job. Connect your camcorder to your computer via FireWire, and OnLocation provides a waveform monitor with two configurable zebra stripes, a vectorscope, an audio spectrum analyzer, and automated quality meters with configurable alerts. The program also includes a helpful module called SureShot to walk you through setting exposure, focus, and white balance, using a bundled white-balance and focus card. It's a bit pedantic, but a wonderful feature for newbie shooters. Overall, OnLocation is the only program in any of the competing postproduction suites that actually helps you shoot better video, which always pays dividends in both quality and production efficiency.

Most Premiere Pro editors at least be considering buying the new program as a bundle, and it's worth taking a look at one of the new members of the Adobe suite that's especially useful for video postproduction itself. The other addition to CS3 Production Premium is Adobe Ultra CS3, another former Serious Magic product. Ultra combines chroma-keying capabilities with the ability to super impose the chroma-keyed video into very sophisticated virtual sets. The value of this program will depend on whether you purchased the entire CS3 suite or just Premiere Pro, and whether you need virtual sets.

To explain, Ultra's chroma-key technology is very advanced — certainly superior to any native Premiere keying effect — but it doesn't integrate with Premiere Pro. You have to apply the filter, produce a final video, and import that back into Premiere Pro. You'll find this worth the hassle if you own only Premiere Pro, but if you own the entire suite, you'll probably prefer to use After Effects with the excellent Key Light plug-in via Dynamic Link.

Of course, if virtual sets are important components of your productions, you'll find Ultra's 14 virtual sets (with more sold separately) both attractive and highly configurable — certainly beyond anything you could easily create in After Effects.

Encore

Adobe Encore is also relatively unchanged on the Windows platform — save the addition of Flash output and Blu-ray Disc production.

Conceptually, Encore converts your video to a Flash production that you can upload to a website for viewing on the Internet. This makes it a great tool for client approvals and an alternative distribution format for some productions. Some producers may use Encore as a simple tool for producing Flash output — even in cases when a traditional DVD isn't anticipated.

In general, the Flash tool worked as advertised, but encoding times are very lengthy. In my test, it took 84 minutes to produce a one-menu, four-button production with six minutes of HDV video on a 2.66GHz dual-processor, quad-core HP xw8400 workstation. Caveats include the fact that encoding is only one-pass, constant-bit-rate (CBR) encoding — not the higher-quality two-pass, variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoding available from such tools as On2 Flix Pro and Sorenson Squeeze.

In addition, I noticed Encore produced my 16:9 videos as 4:3 videos, with letterboxes on the top and bottom. I would have preferred native 16:9 output files and menus. Still, because the letterboxes match the black background of the HTML page that contain the Flash presentation, few viewers will notice.

Blu-ray Discs

To me, Blu-ray is the most important new feature in the entire Windows CS3 Production Premium suite. In general, Adobe delivers, but I certainly hit my share of speed bumps along the way. To set expectations, understand that Encore doesn't enable the full range of advanced Blu-ray features — it merely extends its DVD authoring feature set to Blu-ray Discs. This is similar to Apple's HD-DVD support in DVD Studio Pro and the Blu-ray support in Sonic Solution's DVDit.

From my perspective, the most significant (and enduring) feature deficit in CS3 is the need to render sequences in Premiere Pro before inputting them into Encore, and this hasn't changed. Adobe did add an Export to Encore feature to Premiere Pro that lets you choose a preset and create a new Encore project. However, the Premiere Pro encoding presets don't precisely match those provided in Encore. This makes me nervous about re-encoding my videos, and the new Encore project won't necessarily match the encoding preset I selected in Premiere.

Specifically, if you choose a Blu-ray preset in Premiere Pro, Encore may still create an SD project. That's because Encore creates a project that matches the last project produced, rather than that specified in the Premiere Pro preset. If you pay attention, you can change to Blu-ray and avoid re-encoding, but it's a surprising rough spot from a company that bangs the integration drum so loudly.

Lest my glass sound half empty at this point, you should understand that I discovered two Encore bugs along my path to Blu-ray nirvana. Also, Encore simply doesn't work well with the Pioneer BDR-101A Blu-ray burner (as noted in Adobe's soon-to-be-published recommended-recorder list). Although the bugs added several days of diagnostic time to the production process, they weren't serious. One was an installation problem that will affect relatively few users; the other, a true bug with a simple workaround — and both will be corrected in the next interim release.

Still, it was a struggle for me to produce my first Blu-ray Disc (using the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive). The results, however, were clearly worth the wait. The project was a 90-minute ballet performed by my wife's ballet company. I shot the production with the excellent combination of Canon XH A1 and Sony HDR-FX1 camcorders. The disc played successfully on my Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player and JVC HDTV. To my eyes, the video quality was indistinguishable from that of the original video — sharply detailed and completely free of noise or any compression artifacts, even during highly detailed motion sequences.

The path to producing a distributable high-definition optical disc has been extremely rocky. And if you're like me, it breaks your heart to down-rez your luscious high-definition input to SD formats. Now that Adobe is onboard with a good solution, and the recorder and player situation is starting to firm up, high-definition optical delivery can start to be the rule rather than the exception.

The Mac story

How do the Mac versions stack up? As you probably know, although OnLocation is included in the Macintosh retail product, it runs only on Windows. It should run on a Mac via Apple Boot Camp. However, Ultra, which also runs only on Windows, is not in the Mac build.

As far as I could tell, the Mac and Windows versions of Encore were identical — even suffering from the same exact non-installation related bug mentioned earlier. There were, however, major differences between the Mac and Windows versions of Premiere Pro, as I'll delineate in a moment.

Let me start with a brief public service announcement that you've probably already heard. That is, in producing the Mac version of Premiere Pro, Adobe didn't try to fix the previous version (Premiere 6.5) that left such a bad taste in many users' mouths. Rather, Adobe produced the original Windows version of Premiere Pro 1.0 from scratch, with 2.0 and the current CS3 version following from there.

Then, after Intel-based Macs became popular, Adobe decided to port over the Windows code base. This doesn't guarantee that the program will be problem-free, but Adobe clearly didn't put the Mac version together with duct tape and baling wire.

That said, how do the versions compare? Well, the Mac version doesn't include all the effects available in the Windows version, and some effects are implemented differently. For example, Adobe didn't port the Chroma Key effect to the Mac; instead, there's only the Color Key, which I find less effective on some test clips. Also missing is the Levels Settings dialog, a visual tool that displays a histogram and lets you bracket your exposure and gamma levels to maximize contrast in a video.

Using an NLE over the years, you fall in love with your own workflow, and the Levels Settings dialog is always my first step. True, Adobe offers a range of other exposure-related adjustments — both automatic and manual — bolstering the company's claim that it didn't duplicate effects that Adobe deemed repetitive. Still, although I may be the only editor who feels this way, I'll miss that dialog on every project that I edit on the Mac.

Otherwise, the most significant comparative deficit is the inability to produce RealVideo or Windows Media files with the Macintosh version of the Adobe Media Encoder. Although few producers will care about the former, Windows Media is one of the leading streaming media formats on the Web. If I were Oliver Stone on a paranoid day, I'd cite the lack of Windows Media support as part of an insidious Adobe plot to advance the usage of Flash video on the Internet, subjugating user needs for their own corporate interests. Back as Jan Ozer, it means that Windows Media producers will need to buy a third-party encoder and endure a two-step production workflow rather than the one-step workflow that's possible on the Windows platform.

Neither can the Mac version export to tape when working with HDV, or import or export AAF files — which could be a problem for users who need project compatibility with other editors, such as Avid Xpress.

Those considering the Mac version of Premiere Pro CS3 should also know that it doesn't open Premiere Pro 2.0 projects, although the Windows version does. The Mac version will load Windows projects saved with Premiere Pro CS3, so Mac buyers can always download a trial version of Premiere Pro for Windows, save their 2.0 projects to CS3 format, and edit away. In this way, I converted several very complicated projects to CS3 and opened them on the Mac with no problem.

On the other hand, not only will the Mac version of Encore not open previous Windows projects, it won't open projects produced by the Windows version of Encore CS3. Encore CS3 Windows will open previous Encore projects, but not projects produced by the Mac version.

What's the net? Windows users get Encore in the box, with Blu-ray and Flash output, along with OnLocation and its lovely waveform monitors. These alone are worth the price of the upgrade. Vista haters like me get an alternative production platform, while those already on the Mac get an affordable, easy-to-use option to Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro — and a great Blu-ray option. While there are some rough edges, it's still a great deal all around.

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bottomline

Company: Adobe
www.adobe.com

Product: Premiere Pro CS3

Assets: Easy-to-use Time Remapping effect, addition of Adobe OnLocation to address the waveform monitor deficiency, Adobe Ultra chroma-keying capabilities.

Caveats: Drops 2d3's SteadyMove video-stabilization effect, Blu-ray rendering function labor-intensive.

Demographic: Both Windows and Intel-based Mac video editors.

PRICE: $799 (FULL); $299 (UPGRADE)

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.