Ready, set, edit
As with all of the previous versions of Premiere, installation is a snap--just insert the CD-ROM and follow the instructions. Premiere ships with some of the best documentation in the industry, including a well-written user guide, online help, and an excellent training CD-ROM from Total Training. Phone tech support is free (although you'll have to pay for the cost of the call) for 90 days if you're purchasing the program for the first time or for 30 days if you're upgrading.
Once you start up the program, you'll be asked what type of video you want to create, from a simple clip for the Web to full-resolution DV movies. After you've made your selection, the Premiere Timeline window opens up and allows you to assemble your videos. If you're accustomed to using other Adobe products, such as Photoshop, you'll find the interface's organization very familiar. When it comes to capturing video, Premiere 6.5 supports a greater variety of DV devices than its predecessor, including the popular Sony DVCAM video decks.
Real time only part-time
Within Premiere 6.5, you'll find several powerful new editing features. Three DirectX audio plug-ins from TC Electronics let you do everything from adding reverb to improving volume on a poorly recorded audio track. Just click and drag an effect onto an audio file, and a TC Electronics window will open so that you can make adjustments. On the Mac side, Adobe bundled Sparkle, a stereo audio-editing program, which, while impressive, lacks the real-time features of PC-based TC Electronics plug-ins. Therefore, you will need to render any changes you make to a Mac audio file.
At long last, you don't need to use an external program to create truly impressive titles and graphics within your production. Premiere 6.5 includes a full-featured titling app called Adobe Title Designer, which lets you tweak your text and graphics to your heart's content. The 90 included PostScript fonts add even more pizzazz to your titles.
We tested the new version's much-touted real-time previewing with a single-processor, 1.7GHz Pentium 4 desktop computer with 256MB of RAM. The feature worked as advertised, providing a generally smooth view of footage with effects, transitions, and titles added. However, there are a couple of limitations to be aware of. Unlike Vegas Video, Premiere won't let you preview on an NTSC video monitor. And you'll need to make sure that your system is up-to-snuff before getting all excited about the previews. Although you can run the program on a slower machine, you won't be able to view real-time previews on a PC that's slower than 800GHz or on a sub-G4 Mac. And of course, Adobe recommends dual processors for the best performance. On a positive note, unlike in Final Cut Pro and some other editing programs, the real-time preview in Premiere works on all transitions, effects, audio (for PC users), and graphic layers.
Now includes DVD authoring
Like many current Windows-based editing programs, Premiere 6.5 comes bundled with a third-party DVD-authoring program, Sonic Solutions DVDit LE, a scaled-back version of the company's high-end DVD-authoring tool. The program has a feature set that falls somewhere between that of Dazzle DVD Complete and that of Apple DVD Studio Pro. DVDit is nicely integrated into Premiere; you can export your timelines complete with chapter markers directly from Premiere with the Adobe MPEG encoder. Once you've encoded your video, just open up DVDit to design your DVD menu and burn your clips to a disc.
Divided platforms
Advanced amateur video editors will appreciate the boost in productivity that real-time previewing brings, as well as the expanded creative options of the new titling and audio tools. However, it's hard to recommend the Mac version of Premiere over Final Cut Pro, which offers even more extensive controls for audio, editing, and effects. At the very least, Mac users might want to wait until Adobe adds DVD authoring.
Real-Time Preview
Perhaps the most visible addition to Premiere 6.5 is support for software real-time preview. As the processing power of desktop and even laptop systems has increased, it is now possible to preview your timeline in software, without needing assistance from a hardware card. You can see the visual effects of your edits immediately, including transitions, effects, and titles, instead of needing to wait to render each time you want to experiment with a change.
Premiere provides built-in presets with real-time preview enabled for DV editing. On recent fast machines, you can enable it for all your projects as well. Premiere scales the preview to take advantage of the available system horsepower, and degrades quality and frame rate gracefully on less powerful machines. With DV projects, you also can view the preview through a FireWire / IEEE 1394 connection, and display it on an external monitor.
However, the availability of real-time preview still does not mean the end of rendering. When you output your final production, you still need to have Premiere render the final output frames in order to generate transitions and effects at full quality and to have the final frames prepared for real-time output to DV or for Print to Video.
Adobe's posted system requirements for real-time preview are a G4 processor (G4 dual recommended) on Mac and a Pentium III 800MHz (Pentium 4 dual processors recommended) on Windows. Adobe Title Designer
Premiere 6.0 included a simple Title editor for formatting text and graphics with rolls and crawls. Version 6.5 adds the new Adobe Title Designer, a much more sophisticated tool for broadcast-quality title sequences that includes features similar to Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. (The old Title editor is still available for compatibility with old projects.)
The Title Designer includes high-quality text and drawing tools, plus management of styles and properties, and transformations and animation. Besides the basic text formatting options such as fonts, sizes, and colors, it adds typographic controls such as kerning, leading, baseline shift, slant, and rotation. You also can apply edge treatments such as outlining, embossing, and bevels, and control transparency, drop shadows, and gradients. You even can map a texture patterns onto text.
MPEG Export to DVD
With the exploding interest in desktop DVD authoring, Premiere 6.5 now supports exporting directly in DVD-ready MPEG format, to use with Mac and Windows DVD authoring tools. However, you should use MPEG only for the final exported clips; although you can import compressed MPEG clips into Premiere, but it's not a good idea to edit them because any further processing or re-compression will cause visible degradation.
On Windows, Premiere includes the Adobe MPEG Encoder for exporting, and Sonic DVDit! LE for DVD authoring. The MPEG Encoder, powered by Main Concept (www.mainconcept.com), includes presets to export to common DVD and Video CD formats, NTSC and PAL, as well as advanced options to set encoding options down to the subtlest detail. You then can import these files into the included Sonic DVDit! LE (www.dvdit.com), and author great-looking DVDs with interactive menus and custom titles and graphics.
On Macintosh, Premiere interfaces with Apple's DVD Studio Pro (www.apple.com/dvdstudiopro). If installed, DVD Studio Pro adds the QuickTime File Exporter module to your system, so you can export to MPEG directly from Premiere. You can then import the files into DVD Studio Pro, which can use chapter makers set in the Premiere Timeline. Of course, you also can export files in DV format to use with Apple's iDVD.
Windows Media and Web Integration
On Windows, Premiere 6.5 now both imports and exports Windows Media format (www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia). You can import Windows Media video footage and music tracks, and edit them directly within Premiere. Previously, Windows Media was mostly a write-only format for content delivery, but it is starting to be opened up to be used more as a capture format for audio and video clips that you then want to edit.
Because Microsoft released the latest version of Windows Media in September 2002, after Adobe shipped Premiere, Adobe has posted a plug-in update on its web site to support the Windows Media 9 (which you may have heard as code-name Corona).
As before, on Windows, you also can export to Windows AVI files, Apple QuickTime (www.apple.com/quicktime), and to the Web using the RealMedia exporter (www.realnetworks.com).
On Macintosh, Premiere can export to usual QuickTime file formats and compressors. In addition, with the QuickTime File Exporter module installed (from DVD Studio Pro), you can access the same capabilities as QuickTime Player Pro, with export to Windows AVI files, and extensive control over exporting to QuickTime streaming formats.
Audio Processing
The Premiere 6.5 product includes several new audio processing tools from TC Works (www.tcworks.de), plus additional SmartSound QuickTracks from Sonic Desktop (www.smartsound.com) to automatically create music and audio effects.
On Windows, Premiere includes three Direct-X plug-ins from TC Works to sweeten audio: Dynamics, EQ, and Reverb. These provide convenient control-panel interfaces so you can experiment with audio clips as they are playing, varying the effect dynamically in real time. You can use the TC Dynamics effect to boost the sound quality of an audio track with compression and expansion. Use TC EQ to equalize an audio track by manipulating specific frequencies to highlight particular sounds or to minimize noise. Use TC Reverb to add ambience to audio tracks by simulating the acoustics of sound in different environments.
Installation:
Just install the software and use the serial key in serial.txt to make it a full version........
Excellent. Here's hoping it works. When the serial number goes in, the firewall will be up. Hopefully when this version was made, Adobe weren't as good as they are now at activation.
Thanks for this upload of 2 years ago that is still seeding. Wow.
