I've long been familiar with Adobe's offerings in the video editing space, but have never had the opportunity to explore them. Recently, however, Church Production Magazine offered me the assignment of reviewing Adobe's Premiere, After Effects, and Audition applications, and this presented the opportunity to take some time to explore what these applications have to offer. In this review, we're taking a quick look at Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5—Adobe's non-linear video editing application.
Knowing that video-editing applications can be complex programs to learn, I turned to the book “An Editor's Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro” by Harrington, Carman and Greenberg as a guide up the learning curve of Premiere. This book turned out to be a competent introduction to the program; it doesn't dive into a lot of the details of the application, but for a whirlwind tour to get me off the ground, it worked. In the process of reviewing Premiere, I edited five video projects—four for clients and one for my church. This gave me the opportunity to get a good feel for the application.
Premiere Pro CS5.5, released in mid 2011 (list price, full version, from $799), provides a customizable user interface, enabling you to place the various panels that give you access to the program's functionality pretty much anywhere you desire—including on separate monitors. I use a three-monitor system for video editing, and this flexibility lets me dedicate my main window almost entirely to the timeline, and push secondary windows such as the media browser panel, the project and information panels, and effects and presets panels off to my left-hand monitor. My third monitor I use for a program monitor.
The basic workflow in Premiere is to create a new project with basic settings as to where temporary and captured audio and video files are to be stored. With Premiere, a project isn't an actual video editing “session,” it holds multiple video editing Sequences, so you don't deal with things like frame rates and dimensions at the project level.
Getting started
Once you have your project created, you can start importing the media you want to incorporate into your video(s). And, you can create your first Sequence—the part of a project that has a timeline where you assemble your video. A Premiere project can hold many Sequences, and a Sequence itself can be added to the timeline of another Sequence. This is cool—you can compose more complicated parts of your video as their own Sequences, and then use them within the “main” Sequence for your video and reduce the complexity of that main timeline. I liked that a lot.
And speaking of using things within the timeline, Premiere is well integrated with other Adobe applications such as After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator. I love that I can add an After Effects (Adobe's Motion Graphics program; look for more about this in a future review) composition directly into my Premiere timeline without having to render out that After Effects composition first. Ditto with Illustrator and Photoshop—no more having to open a company logo in Illustrator and rendering it out as a PNG file before using it in my video.
To work with the timeline, the normal workflow is to open a clip in the Source monitor panel, mark in and out points, and then tell Premiere to add it to the timeline of the current Sequence you are editing. This took a little getting used to, because I am used to dragging things directly to the timeline and manipulating them there. However, if the new source overlaps something else on your timeline, that piece of video can effectively “go away” from the timeline—not the case with the editor I normally use. So, using the source window is more of a necessity than I'm accustomed to.
As you build up your timeline by placing clips adjacent to each other, this creates a “cut” edit—a sharp, immediate transition from one clip to the next. To create a crossfade transition (or any other non-cut transition), you drag a transition from the effects panel and drop it on the timeline where the two clips butt up to each other. The exact timing of the transition can be adjusted by handles in the transition area.
Playback of the timeline was smooth and worked well, including playback at multiples of normal speed.
What's next?
Premiere has numerous effects and transitions available, including color correction, perspective effects, and keying—all the normal effects are there, and then some. For instance, there's an effect to generate lighting strikes and an effect to simulate the writing of text onto the screen.
When it's time to render out your video into a file you can share, you select the Sequence you want to export and go to the File->Export menu option. This brings up a window where you select your output format and specific settings you want to use. Once you're happy with your selections, you can then render the file right there, or, select the Queue button. The Queue button brings up Adobe's Media Encoder, its all-purpose rendering engine for programs like Premiere and After Effects. You can queue up Sequences or compositions to be rendered, and let Media Encoder do the render, freeing up Premiere to work on another Sequence. And what's really cool about it is it recognizes immediately when you're doing something in Premiere that's resource-intensive (like playing the timeline), and pauses the render until Premiere is done. This worked incredibly well—I could render as quickly as possible without limiting or affecting my ability to continue editing other projects.
So, were there any problems or negatives? Yes, there were a few. Once you set a Sequence's frame size, for example, you're stuck with it. You can't go back and change it from 1080p to 720p, for example. That seems unnecessarily restrictive. Another is that I found editing in Premiere to take a bit longer than the application I'm used to. For example, if I want to add a photo into my timeline, why can't I just drag it from Windows Explorer onto the timeline, instead of having to first add it to the project, and then add it to the timeline? Video editing is time consuming enough without adding unnecessary speed-bumps like this into the workflow. Premiere also crashed on me when I plugged in an HDTV into my HDMI display port on my laptop; apparently Premiere doesn't like hardware changes once it's started running.
I had a couple of rendering issues, as well. The first, which occurred only when rendering to H.264 format, went away after I followed Adobe's suggestion of uninstalling Premiere and Quicktime, and then reinstalling. The second, a glitch in a transition between an After Effects composition and my main video clip when rendering to WMV format—and this one did not go away with the reinstall.
Overall, however, the problems were minor. And pretty much every video editing application has its quirks and flaws. So, bottom line? I do like Premiere, and with its tight integration with other Adobe applications that I use a lot, this alone makes me consider moving to Premiere as my editing platform of choice.
Editor's note: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.6 is reportedly set to release sometime in the second quarter of 2012.
