Looks like Premiere 6.5 will be a keeper

Last Updated on April 14, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

Adobe announced Premiere 6.5 yesterday, and it’s got just about everything that should have been in 6.0.
It promises to work better with native DV (which will alleviate the need for hardware like the Pinnacle DV500 card), provides native tools for exporting your video to DVD, VCD, and SVCD, and a titling app, a busload of fonts, better audio tools, and real-time effects and transitions. That’s probably the most important thing; it’s annoying to apply a bunch of effects and then to have to wait a few minutes for it to render all the frames, only to find it wasn’t quite what you were looking for.

I guess it’s like the difference between a film camera and digital. With instant feedback, it’s easier to get good fast when you’re starting off knowing nothing, and if you don’t have to wait for the results, you’ll naturally be a little more adventurous as well. The inevitable result is we’ll see lots of amateur home movies making inappropriate use of transitions, but we’ll see more really good stuff too.

Like what? You can pan and zoom on still photos to bring them to life, but the effect can work well on video too. If you find yourself wishing you’d zoomed in on someone, you can go in after the fact and do it. You’ll lose quality if you zoom in and stay there (zooming to 200% effectively halves your resolution) but if you don’t stay there long, it’s hard to notice. And zooming to 125% can be an effective way to crop a video clip if an unwanted element happens to sneak in the frame, and you don’t lose enough resolution to really notice.

The other advantage to having the computer do your pans and zooms is that it’s always perfectly smooth. Eventually I’ll be able to do both smoothly, but I have trouble making a zoom look good by hand. I tend to rush it. Of course, I could fix that too, as long as it’s smooth but just too fast, by slowing it down… Only problem with doing that is the slower you run the footage, the grainier it looks.

Audio processing is something that always should have been there too. What you get in 6.5 is limited–the most useful effect for video editing, a compressor/normalizer to keep the volume consistent, isn’t included–but dynamics and reverb are. So, every red-blooded American male who’s ever wanted to add monster truck rally-style voiceovers to home movies–Sun-day Sun-day Sun-day!–is covered. But supposedly the Windows version uses standard DirectX plugins, and there’s a decent library of those out there. Including some freebies. Here’s a nice list.

I’m still incredibly annoyed with Adobe over its blatant disregard for free speech, but it looks like this is something I’ll need.

I’ll add that to my list of things I need to buy. It’s getting awfully long now: a tapeless digital recorder, a digital camera (at least 1.3 megapixel, but of course I want 4), a big SCSI drive, and now a Premiere 6.5 upgrade. And while I’m at it, I guess I ought to pick up a faster motherboard and CPU and some DDR memory, eh?

I won’t be buying any of ’em this month. Or next month, probably. At least I have a good excuse to put off the motherboard: I want DDR400, and it’s not available yet.

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3 thoughts on “Looks like Premiere 6.5 will be a keeper

  • July 24, 2002 at 11:01 pm
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    I’m testing comments on my new server.

  • September 3, 2002 at 10:43 am
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    Dave,

    We talking about doing more video at our church, and need a video editing system. I know computers, but don’t have any experience with video editing. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind providing some advice on building a video editing system from scratch. Specifically, the type of PC I need, the video capture cards, software, camera etc.. And of course since this is a church, it would be preferrable to keep the costs reasonable.

    There are a couple of related things I also need to deal with, that you might also be able to help with. First, Apple has the rep of being the best for graphics and possibly video. Should Mac be considered? Is it truly the best?

    My paster has a notebook PC, and wouldn’t mind doing the video editing on that. I see that ADS Technologies has a USB Instant Video (and USB Instant DVD) products. Is that something worth even considering?

    TIA. You can email me direct, or post here. I am sure this is a topic some of your readers besides me would be interested in.

    Frank

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