Premiere 6.0: A Boon for Streaming Producers
Adobe Premiere is a classic video capture and editing application used by many professional editors. Given that it is bundled with over 50 capture cards for Windows and Macintosh computers, Premiere finds its way into almost all video production suites. Some professionals rely on it solely as a software editing application; others might utilize its well-integrated capabilities with other Adobe products like After Effects.
Today, streaming media production teams can look to Premiere as a useful tool for creating all the current formats for publishing to the Web in one handy package. With that in mind, this review focuses on Premiere 6.0's video and audio format options for exporting movies ready to stream on your Web site.
Capture, Edit and ExportAdobe Premiere 6.0 offers enhanced support for getting video footage into and out of the application via standard video file formats. New and improved features include:
- DV capture from most of the popular Firewire capture cards on the market.
- EDL (Edit Decision List) support for many analog and digital sources from Sony and Grass Valley, among others.
- Preset input formats for square (640 by 480) and non-square (720 by 486) pixels in both NTSC and PAL, standard and widescreen.
- Customizable export formats for QuickTime and AVI.
Premiere 6.0 offers enhanced project management capabilities to support intelligent assignment of multiple input and output requirements for different projects. It will guess what your requirements are (i.e., it defaults to manufacturers' recommended settings for DV boards) and you can customize and save a project's capture and export settings.
One of the great new features is the Settings Viewer, found under the Project Menu (see diagram, page 61). Here you see a snapshot of the project settings for capture, editing and exporting. The third column in the menu lists the imported clips as a pulldown, with their corresponding format specifications. Lines highlighted in red indicate that there are incompatibilities between some of these formats, which will need to be resolved in order for Premiere to properly interpret and export your edited project.
The new Settings Viewer is a welcome addition, but I'd like it to be a little more customizable and user friendly. For instance, I don't have a capture card on this particular computer, so I don't need to see all the red incompatibility marks it shows.
The last column in the Settings Viewer lists the Export settings. In previous versions, you would want to export to QT or AVI in an uncompressed, lossless format so that your edited material could be encoded using RealProducer, Windows Media encoder or Media Cleaner Pro. Now most of this functionality is built right into Premiere 6.0.
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