A Look Inside Adobe Premiere 6.5

Adobe Systems Inc. took the wraps off of Premiere 6.5, the latest iteration of the company’s popular and long-running digital video editing application. The newest version of Premiere is Mac OS X compatible and sports myriad new features and enhancements. Recently MacCentral spoke with Adobe Premiere product manager Bruce Bowman to find out what’s new under the hood of the new version.

FireWire spurring growth in digital video
“The biggest factor that’s affecting the growth of digital video right now is FireWire,” said Bowman. Digital video camera sales growth is outpacing analog video camera sales growth and has been for the past several years, according to Sony’s own market research.

Bowman noted that FireWire standard across the entire Macintosh product line and has become standard on an increasing number of PCs offered by Sony, HP and Compaq. FireWire add-on boards are available for PCs for less than $100, and the IEEE 1394 Trade Association’s recent decision to license the FireWire brand identity from Apple will help to build awareness of the technology in a less confusing and disjointed way as it has now — where FireWire, iLink and IEEE 1394 all mean the same thing, but users of the technology may not be aware of such interoperability.

Mac OS X now supported
“It was a significant investment to port Premiere 6.5 to Mac OS X,” said Bowman. And with Apple’s continued emphasis on the “digital hub” concept, Bowman said that Premiere 6.5 integrates really well with existing Apple technology.

“Apple makes it really easy,” said Bowman. Not only does Apple include all the tools you need to import and edit digital video, he said, but it gives you the software you need to write that content back out to DVD-Rs if you’re using a SuperDrive equipped Mac. Bowman’s own company has had to license technology from Sonic to manage that capability on the Windows side.

But with iMovie already included with Macs these days, is there still room for Premiere in the Macintosh market? Adobe certainly thinks so. Bowman explained that Adobe has positioned Premiere mid-way between a consumer application like iMovie and a professional application like Final Cut Pro. This is reflected by Premiere’s price — about $550, unchanged from the last version.

Real-time software effects now supported
Bowman said the biggest change in Premiere 6.5 is support for real time software effects. “Anything you can do in Premiere can now be previewed in real time,” Bowman said. “Titling, chromakeying, even third-party effects.”

Bowman explained that Premiere dynamically adjusts the frame rate of video playback on the fly in order to accommodate special effects. It will drop quality to draft mode if necessary to maintain proper playback. “It does this without falling out of sync, so the workflow remains smooth and consistent,” he said.

Surprisingly, Premiere’s hardware system requirements aren’t that steep. The software runs on a Power Mac G3, though Bowman notes that a G4 loaded up with lots of RAM will offer users a better overall experience.

If you’re still using Mac OS 9, you’ll find that Premiere is well-supported by hardware add-on boards like the Matrox RTMac, to further enhance performance for special effects rendering. Bowman said that Matrox’s engineers are still working on Mac OS X support for their board, however.

The software also features new titling capabilities billed as Adobe Title Designer. It incorporates typographical controls including outline text, leading, kerning and baseline shift. You can use more than 300 pre-designed templates, with support for still layouts, rolls, and crawls, and you can customize your own text styles if you prefer. You can import text files, map textures onto text, apply multicolor gradients, emboss, bevel text edges, apply shadows, and control transparency as well.

Sound gets some improvements in Premiere 6.5, thanks to the inclusion of TC Works’ SparkLE. It provides two-track audio processing capabilities and enables you to work with WAV, AIF, SDI, and QuickTime audio formats. You can also decode MP3 audio with it. Even better, SparkLE supports VST audio plug-ins and ASIO hardware, so if you have a MIDI sequencing rig you’d like to hook up with your Premiere editing station, you’ll be good to go.

Integration is key
Adobe recognizes that integration with Apple’s own digital video capabilities is key to Premiere’s success. That’s why Premiere 6.5 integrates with both iDVD — Apple’s consumer-level DVD authoring software — and DVD Studio Pro, Apple’s pro-level DVD mastering solution. You can save content in DV format for use in iDVD. And with DVD Studio Pro installed, you can create DVDs in MPEG2 format straight from the Premiere timeline. Timeline marker data can be exported, so you can use your Chapter points and 1 Frame data with DVD Studio Pro also.

That’s not all. Adobe’s MPEG Encoder enables you to export MPEG1 files as well, so you can deliver content to VideoCD, SVCD or to the Web. You can also output back to DV or to analog tape (if your Mac is equipped to interface with such devices).

Integration with other Adobe products is also key for the latest version of Premiere, said Bowman. Five new plug-ins are included with Premiere 6.5 from After Effects, Adobe’s motion graphics and visual effects package. Bowman explained that Premiere 6.5’s new “Edit Original” command lets you work with your original bitmapped images, vector graphics and motion effects in Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects — when you save your changes, you’ll see your updated content in Premiere, too. You can even import your movie into a GoLive-made Web page and keep metadata intact.

System requirements for Premiere 6.5 call for a PowerPC-equipped Mac, Mac OS 9.1 or later, 32MB RAM, 50MB HD space, QuickTime 5.0.2 or later. If you’ll be using Premiere for DV-based import and export, you’ll also need a 300MHz or faster processor, FireWire 2.7 or later, IEEE-1394-equipped interface, and HD capability of sustaining at least 5MB/sec transfer rate.

Look for Adobe Premiere 6.5 to hit store shelves in the third quarter of 2002. The software will retail for $549, with upgrades available from previous versions for $149. Bowman also noted that Premiere 6.5 will be featured in future releases of the Adobe Digital Video Collection, both in its Standard ($1,499) and Production Bundles ($2,499).

“I hope it’s really clear from this announcement that Adobe is dedicated to the digital video market on the Mac,” said Bowman.