Digital Home Thoughts: From Home Movies to Hollywood Blockbusters with Adobe Premiere Pro

Outputting the Final Project
So, you've captured your clips, assembled them into sequences, applied the transitions and effects, mixed the audio … now what do you do with it? You've got a few more choices than you had with previous versions of Premiere Pro :D

The first is an enhancement for an old favourite – export to tape. Premiere Pro can now, when exporting to DV, position the DV recorder at a specific timecode and, therefore, slip the project output into a specific part of the tape.

The second is direct recording to DVD from within Premiere. Now, don't think for a minute that you are going to get a very sophisticated disc with this tool – you still need a DVD authoring tool if you want at least some control over the appearance. What Premiere offers is the ability to burn the project onto a DVD at a user-specific encoding rate with the option to set chapter points where you've got timeline markers and for the playback to loop. That's it. No fancy graphics, no fancy interface – just a nice simple means of burning your project onto a DVD. You can edit the encoding parameters if you like but the presets are probably going to be adequate.

The third is the Adobe Media Encoder. This single tools allows you to export your project in the following formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-1 (VCD preset), MPEG-2, MPEG-2 (SVCD preset), MPEG-2 (DVD preset), QuickTime, Real Media and Windows Media. Once you've picked a format, there are a number of presets that make it easier for you to get your export working. For example, if you pick MPEG2-DVD, you get the same list of presets that you get with the DVD recording tool. If you pick QuickTime, you get a mixture of PAL & NTSC presets for different bandwidths. The list of presets if you pick Windows Media is very extensive indeed, including the high quality Windows Media 9 codecs. Figure 28 & Figure 29 show the sort of settings that can be altered with this tool. As I've said, you are likely to stick with the presets provided unless you've got a particular audience whose needs aren't met with the presets.


Figure 28: Export summary for Windows Media, high quality. Click on the image for the full size image. (33KB)


Figure 29: Export summary for PAL DVD with 5.1 audio. Click on the image for the full size image. (37KB)

As you can see from Figure 29, it is now even possible to create a DVD with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack – something that was unheard of with this level of computing power not so long ago. There has been some confusion amongst users over exactly what you get for your money and what tools you need to do what. If you want to create any sort of Dolby-encoded audio from within Premiere, you are going to be using the SurCode encoder, for which you get three free tries and then you need to buy it if you want to carry on using it. If you have stereo sound, you can create PCM audio from within Premiere. If you want Dolby Digital stereo encoding, you can get that with Adobe Encore.

I'll be talking more about the SurCode encoder and surround sound technologies in a separate review.

Conclusions
Phew! I hope you are still with me – if you are, well done for reading this far. I hope you've found the review useful.

Premiere Pro is a complete rewrite of the product. In fact, you could almost think of it as a new product with the same name. Adobe has done a fantastic job of introducing new features and new ways of doing things. The product needs a lot of processing power if you are going to get the most out of it, so don't skimp on the spec of your computer.

If you already use Premiere, or if you are looking for a mid-to-high level of sophistication, I can heartily recommend buying Premiere Pro. If you are new to video editing, this product might have too steep a learning curve, unless you've either got the patience to master it or the money to buy Total Training's training package :)