Thursday, April 15, 2004
From Home Movies to Hollywood Blockbusters with Adobe Premiere Pro
Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 03:05 PM
Supported formats
The list of supported file formats has grown from the Premiere 6 list, but some formats, e.g. AutoDesk Animation, have fallen by the wayside. The complete list can be seen in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Supported file formats.
Of significant note is the support for Photoshop files. In previous versions, you were able to choose a specific layer to import, or merge the layers together. Premiere Pro extends this capability by offering the option to create a new sequence with each of the Photoshop layers appearing on different tracks. This is an extremely powerful feature as it gives you the possibility of then manipulating the layers within the sequence with effects like motion & opacity, and then using the sequence as the rendered version of the Photoshop file.
Another significant improvement in the support for image files is that Premiere Pro will now support files up to 4000x4000 pixels – without loss of quality! You can now use the motion effect to great effect by zooming into and out of images. This makes photo montages much easier to create and results in a much better picture quality.
You'll notice from Figure 10 that you can import Premiere 6 files & Premiere Pro projects. Backwards compatibility is very strong in Premiere Pro and it works really well. If you import a Premiere 6 project, for example, it gets added to your existing project as a new sequence. This is also what happens when you import a Premiere Pro project – which is great if you want to incorporate the work from one project into another one. Sequences rock!
Under the hood, the other change that has been is one that probably won't immediately be apparent to the user. Previous versions of Premiere worked in the RGB colour space, dealing in terms of different red-green-blue levels. However, DV works in the YUV colour space, where Y is the luminance or brightness component and U & V are the chrominance (colour) components. You may have come across YUV if you have any video appliances that use component video (e.g. high-end DVD players). It is possible to convert between RGB & YUV but it takes processor time, so by eliminating that step, Premiere gets faster. There are a couple of other benefits but they really are getting into the nitty-gritty technical detail :wink:
Transitions
With previous versions of Premiere, the timeline allowed you to have transitions between clips on the Video 1 track only. This was typically arranged by having a 1A clip and a 1B clip, with the transition shown between them, as illustrated in Figure 11. Premiere 6 introduced a new concept, called single-track editing. The transition shown in Figure 11 is also shown in Figure 12 with Premiere configured for single-track editing. Users generally found this mode hard to use because of difficulties with aligning the transition over the two tracks concerned. When Adobe announced that Premiere Pro would only be supporting single-track editing and A/B editing was gone, there was a lot of concern and anguish.
Figure 11: Video transitions in A/B editing mode.
Figure 12: A transition in single-track mode.
However, it soon became clear that Premiere Pro actually delivers the best of single-track and A/B editing. The reason why Premiere Pro needed to move to just single-track editing is because A/B editing was restricting transitions to just the Video 1 track. By adopting single-track editing, Premiere Pro now supports transitions on any video track – compositions just got much more sophisticated!
Building a transition in Premiere Pro is really easy. You start off by taking your two clips and putting them next to each other on the timeline as shown in Figure 13.
Figure 13: Adjoining clips ready for a transition.
In order for a transition to be applied, there needs to be additional material after the end or before the beginning of the clip. In other words, where the two clips touch is initially assumed to be the centre of the transition and you therefore need additional material on either side. To apply a transition to a timeline, you drag the transition down from the video or audio transitions portion of the Effects Pane onto the clips. As you locate the pointer near to the clip join, Premiere Pro changes the pointer to allow you to have a transition that ends with the first clip, that centres across the two clips or that starts with the second clip. I've created a short video clip (see below) that shows this in action, while Figure 14 shows what it looks like after you’ve dropped the transition across the two clips.
Click here for the video clip (15KB) - no sound. Please save the file before playing in order to avoid any problems.
Figure 14: The applied transition.
Selecting the transition causes the Effect Controls pane to show you the settings for that transition and this is where Premiere Pro re-introduces A/B editing but just for the specifics of the transition, as shown in Figure 15. However, the user interface is really powerful within this window. I’m not going to highlight every individual control – a lot of the interface should either be familiar if you’ve used transitions before, or will be familiar because it is carried over from the timeline (e.g. the ability to zoom into the timeline for more detail).
Figure 15: Changing the settings for a transition. Click on the image for the full size image. (33KB)
What is not immediately obvious from this screenshot, though, is that you can:
- Perform a ripple trim on either of the source clips, thus changing the portion of the clip that is used in the transition;
- Slide the transition so that it either starts earlier or later in the timeline whilst retaining the original duration;
- Trim the transition so that the duration of the transition changes, along with either the start or the end point.
Figure 16: Sources for a transition during updates. Click on the image for the full size image. (59KB)
There are some casualties that you might notice if you are a previous Premiere user:
- No Quicktime transitions. Most of them could be achieved in other ways, but the implode and explode ones were quite nice :P;
- No animated icon of the transition. Although the icon was small, it often gave a hint of what the transition did;
- No use of the Info pane to give an explanation of what the selected transition does.
