For anyone who dreams of making a feature video, but lacks the megabucks to pull it off, Adobe Premiere 2.0 is the program for you. Or even if, like most of us, you just want to send Grandma a VHS tape with highlights of baby’s first steps and a title or two, Premiere gives you the tools to make your home video look professionally slick.
This is not to say you can plop Premiere 2.0 onto your basic ClassicII hard drive and just let ’er rip! A QuickTime compatible MacII with 4MB of RAM, an 80MB hard drive, a color monitor, a 4-bit (16 colors) graphics or video display card, Apple system 6.0.7, 32-bit QuickDraw v1.2, and QuickTime 1.0 is the bare bones CPU / software configuration you’ll need.
However, if you really want to use Premiere 2.0 to its potential, you’ll want to have a fast Mac… at least the IIci and/or an accelerator card, 8 or more MB of RAM (the more the better), QuickTime 1.5, as big a hard drive (or other mass storage device) as you can get your hands on, System7.x, an 8-bit or 32-bit video display card, a high quality color monitor, and, unless you are always going to work with predigitized footage, a video digitizing board capable of working in the PICS or QuickTime format.
For the rest of us…
But don’t let all of this technical stuff scare you. The great thing about Premiere is that it provides all the flexibility and power that a professional video editor could ever want with an interface so simple and intuitive that a novice can get up to speed in no time. You start by importing movies and audio clips into the Project window. See Figure1.
 
Figure 1. Use the Project window to import movies and audio clips and to include any special instructions regarding each sequence.
(With the proper hardware, you can capture material directly within Premiere and can even control tape decks from the computer screen.) Version 2 permits you to import whole folders of clips, or multiple clips at a time—a nice added feature that streamlines what used to be a tedious process. The Project window displays the first frame of a film clip or an approximation of the audio wave form, along with various information such as window size, sound quality, etc. There is also a comment box where you can enter notes about each clip. In addition to QuickTime film clips, Premiere will accept audio as AIFF, snd, SoundEdit and QuickTime files. The program will import still images, or a series of numbered still images as animation sequences, from Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as pictures saved in PICT format.
Houdini appears
Once you’ve assembled all your material, you move into the Construction window.
 
Figure 2. In the Construction window you combine video tracks, sound, narration, special effects, titles and other images to create your movie.
Here the magic really starts to happen. Movies and still images are placed into two video tracks; transitions between images go into the special effects track. You can place titles or images into the superimposed track; and there are three audio tracks available for music, sound effects, and narration. Clips are dragged from the Project window and placed into the appropriate track in the Construction window. Special Effects are selected from another window which shows a moving representation of each transition. Some effects come with a number of controls: anti-aliasing options, point of origin selection, thickness and color of borders, and others. (See Figure3.)
 
Figure 3. Many of the special effects in Premiere have flexible controls such as transitions, and thickness and colors of borders.
Premiere premieres new features
There are lots of new features in Premiere 2.0 that provide greater flexibility and ease of use. The program now offers support for 16-bit, CD-quality sound; over 50 new special effects and image filters; the ability to compose titles within the program; and a handy new tool palette in the main construction window that provides quick access to functions previously hidden under the menu bar. The manual has increased from 91 to 161 pages, is logically laid out and easy to use—including a 21page full-color section detailing the construction of various special effects sequences.
Premiere also provides 41 movie and still image filters, and five audio filters. In addition to relatively simple controls like brightness and contrast, you can go wild with blur filters, crystallize filters, and others that twist, twirl, and pinch. Audio filters give you the ability to play sound backwards and create echoes with variable delay and intensity. The beauty of Premiere is the control it gives you over each aspect of the program. The video wave filter, for example, has ten different controls. (See Figure 4.)
 
Figure 4. The video wave filter dialog box provides a number of choices for control.
Everyone needs a title and credit
No movie would be complete without titles, and Premiere 2.0 permits you to type text directly into a Title window. You can then embellish the text with lines, rectangles or ovals and control the fill and border colors, stroke width, shadow adjustment, and opacity. You can change the size of the text over time (make it expand or contract), and choose from a variety of starting points. And, of course, what is a movie without closing credits? you say… The manual walks you step by step through the procedure needed to create rolling credits just like you see at the end of your favorite movies and TV programs.
Ready for the Best Picture award?
Once you have everything composed in the Construction window, it’s time to compile your QuickTime blockbuster. In the Output Options dialog box you can specify window size, frame rate, compression method, picture quality, and several other options. This is where your dreams run head-on into reality.
Hold on, acetate-breath! Reality strikes.
The main challenge facing the would-be movie mogul in using Premiere is the strain QuickTime production places on system resources. Hard disk space can fill up quickly, especially when you start applying filters and complicated effects. Previewing and playback slow down relative to the image quality and the playback window’s size —the better the image quality and the larger the window, the more computer power you’ll need. For example, on a Mac IIfx with 8MB of RAM, we created an 8 second clip with the highest quality resolution possible; the playback window size was a quarter of the 13 inch color screen. It ran at about 25 frames per second (30 fps is the normal video speed)—and this clip required 3.6MB of hard disk space.
To help with these problems during the composing stages, Premiere lets you scale down the image size of your original clips for better performance during editing and previewing. You can shrink a whole folder of clips at one time with a single command. When you’re finished editing and ready to generate your movie, simply use the Re-find Files command, and Premiere exchanges the miniature clips in the Project and Construction windows with your original footage.
Double-edged swords
While Premiere is a wonderful full-featured editing system, the hardware necessary to make full screen, high quality, full-motion video (30 fps) is beyond the average person’s pocketbook at this time. But hope springs eternal! However, use of Premiere-created QuickTime files within other applications to aid or embellish a document or presentation is certainly possible and desirable for most of us. Instead of suffering needless frustration, choose a project you can realistically complete within your own system’s capabilities… augmented, of course, by whatever hardware you can beg, borrow or steal!
We could go on, but…
There are a lot more functions in this program—more than we can cover here without re-writing the software manual. Premiere will function as a complete off-line editing system, generating industry-standard edit decision lists for controlling high-end video production equipment. It provides a way to export video clips into Photoshop for painting and manipulation. Just about anything you can think of to do to video you can find in this package. Whether you need a lot of special effects and precise controls, or just want to put things into sequence, this program will get you where you want to go. Adobe Premiere 2.0 takes all the drudgery out of video editing and retains the fun and excitement of making movies.
