Computer movie maker

Be a Digital Movie Maker

When you market the most highly regarded video editor on the Windows desktop, your first concern for any upgrade should be "Don't mess it up." Hence it's not surprising that Adobe Premiere 6.0 ($550 street) doesn't represent a radical departure from previous versions.

That said, the new version propels Premiere into the DV and Internet eras while enhancing usability and integration with other Adobe tools. Throw in increased stability and you've got a very worthwhile upgrade for 5.1 owners and the editor of choice for Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator, and AfterEffects users.

The Adobe-ization of Premiere is immediately apparent, with a bin window borrowed from AfterEffects and the familiar tabbed window approach from Illustrator and PhotoShop. New in 6.0 is a transitions, audio, and video effects window that groups effects rather than listing them alphabetically and provides a handy search feature.

The new effects/info window displays the effects applied to individual clips, with one-click access to setup controls. Adobe has also added a history window containing up to 99 of your last edit points.

Hoping to avoid an even more cluttered interface, Adobe introduced a new "workspace" feature for configuring and saving window positioning and palette selection for different editing tasks. For example, Premiere includes four canned workspaces for single- and dual-track editing and applying audio and video effects, which we found useful.

Premiere's logging and batch capture interface is more consolidated and intuitive than before. Support for devices compatible with Microsoft's OHCI drivers (Open Host Controller Interface), enabling broad compatibility with inexpensive DV devices, is included as well. In addition, presets for different DV cameras boost capture accuracy and efficiency.

Premiere, however, will not work with the older Texas Instruments DV drivers. Following details on Adobe's Web site, we successfully swapped drivers with our Newer Technology PC Card FireWire 2 Go for Windows.

You can arrange your clips in the new Storyboard window, preview them in sequence, and drop them into the timeline with a standard transition between them. While you'll still likely have to trim heads and tails, this provides a valuable rough cut of your production.

The timeline itself is similar to Premiere 5.1. Changes include a view identifying key frame locations for filters and other effects. Double-click on an asset created in supported applications like PhotoShop and Illustrator and Premiere will load the program, allow you to edit the asset, and then save the modified content to the timeline.

Premiere also includes more than 25 video effects from Adobe AfterEffects. You will appreciate the ability to preview color, saturation, and other similar video adjustments directly on an NTSC monitor, which is generally more accurate than computer monitors for tape-bound productions.

The most unique new feature in Premiere 6.0 is the audio mixer, which displays all audio tracks together with volume and pan controls. Using the mixer, you play your project back in real time, adjusting the volume or left/right pan as you go. All modifications transfer to the rubber band controls beneath the audio track for fine tuning.

Premiere now supports DirectX audio filters, so you can use your filters from Sound Forge and other programs directly on the timeline. Adobe also throws in SmartSound from Sonic Desktop, the easiest program on the planet for creating background music tracks.

When outputting back to DV tape, Premiere 6.0 now produces fewer temporary files, saving rendering time and disk requirements. On one test project, Premiere 5.1 created 207 temporary files while 6.0 created only 19.

You can export your project to the bundled Media 100 Cleaner EZ for encoding into virtually any distribution format or to modules for Real Media or Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies. Project export means you don't have to render an intermediate AVI or MOV file for input into a third-party encoder, saving time and disk space, while Cleaner's unified compression interface simplifies multiple format distribution.

Finally, during tests on a laptop with a Microsoft OHCI DV card and a desktop with Pinnacle Systems-DV 500, Premiere 6.0 was almost crash-free. Premiere saves both recent files and recent projects in the file menu, so you'll no longer have to hunt for your projects each time you open the program.

These last two benefits alone make Premiere 6.0 worthwhile. The total package, however, is an impressive upgrade with lots of value for both new and veteran Premiere users.