The release of Adobe Premiere 1.0 for Windows has been one of the most eagerly awaited events in the history of the Multimedia PC. After a year of waiting, it is finally here!
When the Macintosh version of Premiere was released, it became an instant best seller. As many as 150,000 copies have been distributed. That is why everyone has been waiting for the Windows version.
Non-Linear Editing
Technically speaking, Premiere is a "non-linear editing program for digital video." This means it is as easy to use as film editing but with all the power of video editing and the speed of a computer. Non-linear editing lets you cut and paste video and/or audio simply by pointing and clicking the mouse on your Windows PC.
Please realize that Premiere is much more than just a simple editing tool. It is extremely important that you understand the enormous potential of Premiere.
1. Power.
When looking at tiny digital video movies on your computer screen, it is hard to image why anyone would want to edit movies on a PC.
Yet, with Premiere for Windows, someday you will be able to edit a full-length motion picture on your Windows PC. The current limitation is not with Premiere but with the speed and capacity of your computer. Motion pictures require tremendous amounts of memory and speed. In a few years, this problem will disappear as personal computers become faster and larger.
2. Employment
Premiere opens up employment opportunities for students and adults around the world. Editing (motion pictures or video) is a good paying job.
Did you realize that the average movie editor is paid more than the average lawyer or doctor?
You can learn all about non-linear editing simply by learning to use Premiere. For that reason alone, it is worth buying Premiere.
Premiere should be in every school in the country. It is an excellent way for students to learn drama and communications. Unfortunately, it will be years before the average school teacher is able teach visual communications using personal computers. (Most school teachers in California still do not know how to teach desktop publishing as a form of communications.)
3. Storytelling
Probably the hardest concept to understand is that editing with Premiere is a form of communication. It is storytelling at its best. And storytelling is great fun!
Just think about desktop publishing. At one time, few people understood the excitement and challenge of typesetting on a personal computer. Now, desktop publishing is one of the most important and probably one of the most creative uses of personal computers.
I believe that someday non-linear editing will replace desktop publishing in popularity. And the one program which will make all this possible is Premiere.
The Advantages
Premiere 1.0 for Windows is an extremely sophisticated editor when compared with traditional film editing equipment. Even the sound editing capabilities of Premiere 1.0 for Windows are better than most professional sound studios of the 1980s. With extreme ease, you can cut and paste multiple tracks of sound and video with single frame accuracy.
Premiere 1.0 for Windows has three digital video tracks and three digital audio tracks. You can put any number of audio and video clips on each track and you can combine them in any way you want. Premiere 1.0 for Windows is extremely flexible! If you use all the capabilities of Premiere, you can make very fancy movies.
Limitations
There are three limitations to Premiere:
1. CPU limitations
Premiere is limited by the speed and storage capacity of your computer. In most cases, you will not want to make movies more than three minutes long because of the tremendous disk storage needed for digital images. However, if you think about it, you can say a lot in a three minute drama.
2. Digitizing limitations
You must buy a digitizing card if you want to edit your own film or video material. Digitizing boards like VideoSpigot are great but these inexpensive boards do not have compressor/decompressor chips on board. Therefore, you can only digitize to very small images, usually 160 pixels by 120 pixels.
Similarly, there is no inexpensive film-to-computer converter. You must convert film to video before converting it to digital video. Most annoying!
In a few years, all multimedia PCs will have video compression chips built in. By that time, you will be able to buy a film-to-digital-video converter for under $200. Then things will really be fun!
3. No raw footage
You must wait for a year or two before you will be able to buy unedited movies for you to edit. There are thousands of exciting TV commercials, TV shows, motion pictures, and musical videos which can be made into Editing Workshops. However, the resistance from the motion picture, TV, and computer industries has been overwhelming.
For over a year, the staff of the QuickTime Movie News has been trying to solve this problem. So far, we have been unable to license even student films much less all of the raw footage from Jurassic Park. We have been working with two licensing agents as well as contacting film producers directly but with no luck. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated.
The Demo Movie
To test the capability of Premiere, I created a demonstration movie which is on this issue of the NautilusCD. The movie was made using both the Macintosh and a Windows PC. This is the first QuickTime movie produced using two different QuickTime platforms at once.
I have prepared a detailed report of how this movie was made. It is also on this issue of the NautilusCD Magazine.
Conclusions
After working with Adobe Premiere 1.0 for Windows, I am very pleased with it. It costs only $295 and opens a whole range of possibilities for people who want to make movies. I highly recommend the program, and I am sure that Adobe will sell over 250,000 copies of Premiere 1.0 for Windows.
The major difference between Premiere 1.0 for Windows and the Macintosh versions (version 3) is that the Windows version is fully compatible with Microsoft's Video For Windows as well as compatible with Apple's QuickTime. In contrast, the Macintosh version of Premiere cannot save movies as AVI files.
Premiere has been available for the Macintosh for almost two years. Therefore, I was surprised to see that Premiere 1.0 for Windows is a combination of Premiere 1.0 and Premiere 2.0 for the Macintosh. It does not have 99 tracks of sound and video as does Premiere version 3 for the Macintosh. Nor does Premiere 1.0 for Windows have any titling features or any movement capabilities as does Premiere 2.0 for the Macintosh.
However, Premiere 1.0 for Windows is more than enough to get you started. During the next year, look at the movies that we will be bringing you on the NautilusCD Magazine. They will be ten times better than any movie we made with Microsoft's Video For Windows. There is absolutely no comparison between Premiere and VidEdit.
Probably the greatest shock is that Premiere 1.0 for Windows prefers 16 Megs of computer memory on a 486 to run quickly and smoothly. While it can function in 8 Megs on a 386 (which is what I used to make the demo movie), it has a tendency to stop for ten to twenty seconds every time the virtual memory swaps files, which is very often. The Macintosh version of Premiere can run in 8 Megs without using virtual memory.
The programmers of Adobe Premiere 1.0 for Windows made a number of slight improvements on the handling of the program over the Macintosh version. In many ways, the Windows version works better than Premiere 2.0 for the Macintosh.
The linking feature works differently from the Macintosh version. Cut and Paste no longer unlinks the audio and video clips. (Premiere still does not have a re-linking feature as some professional editing programs have to link separate audio clips and separate video clips to keep them in sync.)
I found one minor problem with Premiere. In Premiere 1.0 for the Macintosh, the DIRECT special effect was set up backwards from the written explanation. The effect was set up to automatically do the opposite of what it was designed to do. This design flaw was corrected in Premiere 2.0 for the Macintosh but the programmers missed this in Premiere 1.0 for Windows.
I also found one major problem, but it is not with Premiere. The problem is with QuickTime 1.1 for Windows. For some unknown reason, movies made with QuickTime do not work as well as they should.
When comparing the same movie made as an AVI file with a QuickTime MOV version, the QuickTime version looked worse than the AVI version and played much slower. This is extremely surprising since all the original clips for my movie were made on the Macintosh in QuickTime. The stereo sound is backwards on the QuickTime version compared with the Windows version for the same movie. The Macintosh version of the movie starts out with a black screen while the QuickTime for Windows version starts with a white screen, which does not work well with compressed movies that do not update the sceen instantly.
We also created a version of this same demo movie using the Cinepac CODEC (compressor/decompressor), which also comes with Premiere 1.0 for Windows. While this CODEC may be wonderful for creating movies that play well from a CD-ROM, it looks much worse than movies created with Microsoft's Video 1 CODEC. The demo movie on this CD-ROM uses the Video 1 compressor.
Premiere 1.0 for Windows is extremely important to all Macintosh movie makers because some audio, video, and animation programs are only available on a Windows PC or on a Silicon Graphics computer. It is wonderful to be able to work on many platforms. Premiere makes this possible.
As Premiere and QuickTime for Windows improve, many of the tools on the PC will be extremely useful for the Macintosh Movie Maker.
In addition, Premiere 1.0 for Windows can be used to convert or capture data files for use in QuickTime movies on the Macintosh. Premiere 1.0 for Windows will be an extremely valuable file conversion tool.
Adobe obviously has a best seller with Premiere 1.0 for Windows. If you are interested in the future of computers, you will want Premiere.
We highly recommend Adobe Premiere 1.0 for Windows.
