Review of Adobe Premiere 4.2 for Windows

Premiere for Windows debuted in 1994. When I reviewed it then (Desktop Video Magazine, April 1994) I considered the software to be a pale consumer grade product compared to the MAC version and to the popular DOS professional standard of the day; D/Vision Pro.

In three short years a lot has changed in NLE. Where there were only three or four choices, today the choices number near fifty. Where there were proprietary systems, wedded to specific computers (like the Video Cube), today the systems are open architecture software. Instead of one price range and capability category, today there are three.

Within this vast range of product choices, I would rank Adobe Premiere 4.2 in the middle category of price and capability, along with Star Media's Video ActionNT and possibly in-sync's Speed Razor Mach III. Selling at around $1,000, and loaded into a Pentium equipped with a Digital Processing Systems (DPS) Perception card, these programs will yield professional results that can be applied to business videos, cable commercials and local affiliate programming.

Premiere, running on a lowly 486 with the most minimal video capture and playback card can be used for training new editors, editing home videos, in-house educational works, and computer based media productions.

Hardware

I tested Adobe Premiere on two Intel machines and a Digital Alpha. The Intel machines were a dual Pentium Pro of my own design and a TDZ-610 (a quad Pentium Pro) from Intergraph. The Alpha machine was a 466 MHz Alpha 21164 of my own design. All of the computers were outfitted with the Digital Processing Systems (DPS) Perception compression/decompression (codec) card, coupled to a 4 gigabyte Seagate Barracuda and 9 gigabyte Elite hard drives.

During the test we added the new 4 gig and 9 gig Micropolis Tomahawk drives (4345 4LP AV and 3391 9 AV respectively), which produce very high throughputs on the Perception board. With transfer speeds that exceed 7MB through the entire disk, you get the full capacity of the drive to use for AV files. So far, the Microplois drives have been reliable, which is nice to report since Micropolis suffered some reliability setbacks while the company was reconfigured and sold.

Sound replication, a critical issue in nonlinear editing, was addressed by a motherboard-integrated Soundblaster 16 in the Intergraph machine, a peripheral Soundblaster AWE 32 (from Creative Labs) in the Alpha and a PCI mounted CardD-Plus card (from Digital Audio Labs) in the dual Pentium.

I would not use the Soundblaster 16 to entertain a dog, much less do professional audio work. It's a toy. The AWE is a little bit better, If my Alpha machine were used for anything but animation rendering and software beta testing I'd upgrade it to the CardD-Plus or an Antex card and I would advise anyone considering broadcast quality audio to do the same. Soundblasters just cannot keep up the speed required by nonlinear editing and often fall out of synch on passages longer than 3 minutes.

Once Peter Haller finished writing the NT drivers for the CardD, it's performance was superb and now ready for the market. This is the best price choice for those who want quality audio, full synch and a price under $700. Of course, those able to spend any amount of money would be very happy with the Antex products and if you have slots to spare (let us hear from both of you), the new DPS Audio4V card can't be beat. So I hear.

Any serious nonlinear editing system should have at least 64 Meg of RAM and both of my machines have 128. The Intergraph 610 has 256! The reason, is that modern nonlinear editing is a software-eclectic procedure. You frequently window out of the editor to Photoshop or Sound Forge to enhance a graphic or capture music. If you do that with 16 Meg, your system will babble like Ralph Kramdon caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Humma-humma-humma. Not a pretty sight.

Another necessity you may encounter in NLE is a means of monitoring both the audio from your source VCR and the audio from your computer. I checked out all the catalogues and Sam Ashe in New York City for a professional studio amplifier that offered at least two switchable inputs. They do not exist.

In an era where all sound mixing and effect generation can be accomplished in a computer, why should we be saddled with monitoring our sound through an analogue mixer? It's like having an 8-track deck in a Testarosa.

Here's what you can do until Mackie wakes up. Buy a Denon PMA-915R consumer amplifier. This is a very clean, adequately powered, easily installed and affordable (under $800) unit that sports four inputs and monster cable speaker jacks. It slides nicely into your 19" rack and with a touch of the buttons you can switch from any one of several source decks (if you're like me, your project studio now has one of each, VHS, SVHS, 3/4, Beta, BetaSP and maybe a D2 or 1"). As you digitize, you can compare source with computer throughput and when you play back, you switch to the computer output. Easy and simple. Try it.

Premiere can also run on a laptop for those days when you simply can't drag yourself from the fishing hole. I loaded some extra memory into
my Cannon Innova and cut a commercial at the beach. Of course, I had to offload the EDL back to the home-base computer over a PCMCIA network connection, but the day at the beach was worth the extra hookup time.

Although Premiere is not yet coded to run on Digital Alpha processors, my 466 MHz machine uses Digital's terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) program, FX-32!, to translate Premiere's native Intel code to Alpha code on the fly. Premiere performed flawlessly, though slower, about as slow as a Pentium 90, but performance improves as FX32! learns each routine and creates new lines of translation code. By the end of a three day project, the Alpha was running Premiere about as fast as a Pentium 166.

Acquiring Footage

Premiere features a batch capture, manual ("movie") capture, stop motion capture and audio capture routines under the "File" menu. Batch capture allows for the input of SMPTE codes for controlling the play VCR. Movie capture opens up a simple "record" button, which, when clicked, starts the recording process. Stop motion allows for single frames to be recorded, for an animation sequence, for instance. Audio capture opens a file requester window where a third-party audio capture file must be initiated. Unfortunately, these features are not compliant with the DPS Perception card.

Premier's documentation notes that if your equipment includes a timecode-capable deck, a controller and a "plug in module that allows you to control the deck through Adobe Premiere," you can operate the deck from the computer control screen and initiate batch capturing. The documentation does not, however, provide information on compatible devices or a means of learning where one purchases them.

Using the DPS Perception card, I manually acquired scenes at broadcast quality in the Perception's record window. The Perception creates proprietary DPS (.pvd) files that must be converted to AVIs, but the two step process is rather quick.

I would suggest that Premiere, coupled with the DPS Perception card, is an ideal configuration for this price stratum. The total cost, at under $4,000, represents a high quality to price ratio. A significant step upward could be made to the Targa DTX card, but then you would be exceeding the boundaries that separate this level of editing solution with the high tier, currently dominated by Avid's MCXpress and soon to be entered by D/Vision's NAB '97 offering. We could leapfrog our way into the $15,000 solution range with no trouble, but then the logic of choosing Premiere itself would fade.

On first entering Premiere, you are requested to select a configuration. Each editor can name a configuration after herself, but we have one at Avekta which is named Avekta and it is set up according to the specific guidelines of a DPS "read me" file, called "Third Party Setup." This, and all setups of Premiere, include such things as aspect ratio, software codec, frame rate, output mode, data rate, etc. Without a guideline, you can select the Premiere default, but this was designed around a minimal PC capability. Be sure that whatever video card you choose, the manufacturer includes a list of Premiere settings because you could spend a week in the outer ring of Dante's inferno doing it yourself.

Once the configuration is set, save it for posterity and enter the realm of Premiere editing.

Weird Mysterious Problem in Premiere

In addition to exhaustive testing, I have used Premiere on three billable projects to date, each of which measured over 7 minutes in finished length. After the third, we noticed a weird problem that was not apparent at first, and in fact, was not noticed by anyone until after the third project was completed.

Just before an effect (dissolve, title super, wipe, whatever), a sudden drop in contrast and a lightening of the scene occur. This begins suddenly on the very first frame of the effect and continues until the very last frame of the effect. Since most effects are 30 frames long, the aberration is hardly noticeable, but make a 120 frame dissolve, or better yet, make a dissolve between two identical clips of footage and you will see the fault immediately.

We fished around for the answer to this among many sources, including Premiere's tech support. The answer came from two of our most trusted dealers, Mike Bushey of Bushey Virtual Construction in La Habra, CA and Paul Frantellizzi at Independent Digital Media, a New York VAR. It seems that Premiere cannot render to the DPS card's internal file format (PVD) and instead renders all effects to AVI.

When you make a movie, Premiere plays the PVD files until it hits an effect, where it cuts to its own AVI file. Because the AVI file is of slightly lower resolution than the original PVD file, the sharp eye will see the difference.

There is no work around other than rendering your entire movie with an invisible effect like a title with no text (Anthony Caviello, our animator, came up with this one), but this basically lowers the entire show to AVI standard. It would be nice if, like Razor, Premiere could render effects directly to PVD file format.

The Editorial Interface

Using the DPS Perception card, users avail themselves of two monitors; the computer screen to control the editing process and the video screen to watch full screen, 30 fps playback. With the exception of the effects problem above, the playback, at DPS's highest resolution (6 Mb/s) is broadcast quality. (Note to sticklers: Define broadcast anyway you want. I define it as such: If you can sell the finished program to a broadcaster, it's broadcast quality. I have, so it is.)

A Windows program, Premier features windows that may be sized and placed on the screen according to the user's taste and layered over each other. Clicking within a frame automatically brings it forward, but it is, like any crowded Windows layout, possible to lose a window completely behind others.

On a default boot, Premiere displays its primary work screen of windows, which include Project, for importing and storing clips; Info, for displaying detailed information about clips; Construction, the timeline window for editing; Transitions, for selecting special effects transitions between clips, and a Preview window, for previewing the movie as you build it in the Constructions window.

Clicking on the File menu and selecting Load Project, brings up a list of previously saved projects. Loading one, will launch and fill in all of the windows that were active on the last Save Project command.

Beginning a project in Premiere, the user simply opens the subdirectory of acquired files, highlights them singly or in groups and actuates Premiere's Import command. Each video or bitmapped clip may be previewed in the import dialog box and then assigned to any work window. The clips may also be immediately added to the Project Window or any library as annotated picons by opening the appropriate window and then initiating the import function.

Clips may be annotated in capture or any time thereafter. Annotations include the title of the clip, its duration, a comment box and two note boxes. Clicking on the column heading of any annotation arranges the clips in alphabetical order by the text within the respective column.

Clips may be organized further by grouping in Libraries. You can open any number of libraries and assign them to multiple projects. I use a "Slate Library" for all my jobs which begins with bars and tone, an effect to my company logo, an inset logo for the slate title and a countdown to black. To load a library, simply drag and drop the clip picons from the Project Window or another library. Clips can also be moved from the timeline (Construction Window) to the library, but the system assumes you are moving, not copying the clips unless you use the copy menu. I would prefer a keyboard command to override the move to a copy, but I could not find one.

Clips are ordered in the Project window in alphabetical order. A number appears in the upper right corner denoting how many copies of the clip are present in the library. If a clip on the timeline is cut into two pieces, the library automatically creates a copy of the clip and numbers it. Since each piece of a cut clip in the timeline may be trimmed back to the full clip length, Premiere makes the assumption that each cut in a clip results in a clip duplication. This is useful for extending the time of an edited sequence where the director did not create enough length of action on either the A or B roll.

Premiere supports picture icons (picons) in the libraries and on the timelines according to the Mirage paradigm. You can choose from four sizes of picons in any window. The picons on the timeline can be shut down and substituted with text bars for faster screen response. The text beside each picon can be easily typed after a mouse click actuates a simple word processor. Text can be used to search and group picons according the words included in the descriptive text.

Clicking on a picon in a library or Project window will activate a preview playback of the clip within its own preview window, but with the Perception card, it's wiser to configure the system so that clicking the picon causes the system to play the clip full screen on the video monitor. The Clip Preview window can still be used, however, to control the playback and mark In and Out points for the clip which are preserved in the picon. The clip may be copied and renamed if you wish to use it repetitively or to use different cue points. The system can automate the grouping of copied clips into separate libraries or the copies can be kept in the Project window.

The libraries and Project Window have one serious shortcoming. They will only stack one vertical column of picons with their textual information in a second column to the right. You can easily position and resize the window however you want, but with one vertical column, the window with the most picons ends up a narrow vertical band. This ends up conflicting with the timeline, which, according to convention, is a horizontal window stretching the length of the screen. As such, the two most often used windows are forced to overlap each other. Why can't Adobe fix this so that the picons can be sized and formatted in horizontal rows and columns across the bottom or top half of the screen in concert with the timeline? Go figure.

The Construction Window is the Timeline

The Timeline is the same timeline that the Egyptians used 5,000 years ago when they made documentaries about the pyramids. It features horizontal bands running left to right (There is no Israeli version running right to left or Chinese version running top to bottom, which would make use of the Library's vertical layout.) The top band is the backmost layer of video and the bottom band represents the layer of video closest to the viewer. There is one Transition/Effects band, between video band one and two. An infinite amount of additional video bands may be added as needed for layering.

Adobe Premiere, like all the middle range NLEs, supports two timeline features which are not considered important by "real editors:" Picons and overlapping clips. Picons let you see the timeline clips as a series of color frames. Picons eat up RAM and tend to slow any machine down. Do you need them? I never thought so while running D/Vision Pro in the early 90's. And then I kind of came to like them when I tried Premiere. If you have a good textual description of the shot on the timeline, and the ability to quickly hop the cursor to the first and last frame of the clip to see it pop on the monitor, what more do you need? Premiere gives you the whole picon experience. Enjoy it.

Premiere also assumes that to understand how a dissolve works, you should see one clip end on the top row while another begins on the third row down. The dissolve itself is represented by a clip on the second row, whose duration is represented by the extent of the overlap of the top and third row. This is very clear for the novice editor, and you may find it really neat. But it uses up a lot of screen to say something that could be just as easily drawn on one row.

To make up for this waste of glass real estate, Premiere allows you to slide the clips left and right on their respective rows, which is a nice feature originated by Adobe and copied by most mid range NLEs. Again, this is something that "real editors" find cloying, but here, I think, real editors are being too Spartan. I think sliding clips is good and that MCXpress could improve with it.

On the Timeline

At the top of the timeline are two, thin, horizontal bands. The top band is the Work Area Bar which features a yellow band which may be stretched left and right by mouse-dragging the ends. This bar instructs Premiere what area of the timeline you want processed. For instance, if you want to make a movie of one short area of the timeline, make the yellow bar cover that area of the timeline and then ask Premiere to render work area, and only the yellow area will get processed.

The second band is the time increment band which features tick marks that denote time increments. The time increments will change as the zoom control of the screen, which is found at the bottom of the control window, is adjusted.

The zoom control of the screen, an important feature in any NLE, is set with a small slider that gives an infinite range of settings from as low as 1 frame and as high as 2 minutes. When editing long documentaries, this feature is very useful since it allows the user to easily size the timeline to the varying perspectives of the editor's project view; large to get the overall feel of a show, small to do a detailed montage sequence.

The timeline features a cursor that plays both video and audio as it is scrubbed. The cursor, a triangle residing in a graduated horizontal band directly above the top video band, features a thin, black, vertical line that crosses all the horizontal bands. If you are zoomed in close and the cursor plays to the end of the picture area, the underlying timeline does not move, representing the continuous play. If becomes inactive at the far right of the timeline view.

Individual bands of video and audio may be selected or deselected for scrubbing playback. Select by holding the Alt key and clicking at the far left border of the timeline. Radio buttons allow for VCR type playback control and the cursor responds to arrow key inputs for inching the playback forward and backward.

Without effects, Premiere will playback in full resolution to the video monitor, although the playback drops frames to create a jerky result which is considered a characteristic of Premiere.

Editing Style

As one begins to edit in Premiere, the easiest routine seems to be to simply throw clips from wherever you've grouped them (Project Window, Libraries, etc.) onto the timeline as butt cut edits. Hitting the play button on the upper right, the show runs, albeit jerkily, and displays the basic order of the shots you've selected. If you don't like a shot's position, it's easy to grab it with the mouse, slide it down to another video track (not as an effect, but just to get it out of the way temporarily), and then close up the gap.

To do this, select the track tool (it looks like a right-pointing arrow) or the multitrack tool (two right-pointing arrows) at the bottom of the timeline, and use it to automatically select all the clips from the end of the hole to the end of the show. The multitrack tool will pick up all the tracks, such as audio, while the track tool only picks up one track at a time.

After your sequence of shots is completed it's time to trim each shot. You can do this by opening a clip window and using the numerical or mouse-click input commands to trim the clip. I find it faster to trim the clip right on the timeline. Simply click on the head or tail of the shot and drag it left or right, then adjust the gaps,

If your clips are really long, you may find it easier to razor cut whole chunks of the clip off. Simply take the razor tool to the cursor and click. If you hold the Alt key, the razor will cut across all activated tracks. This is useful if you plan to use the razored parts for other scenes, since Premiere automatically makes a separate clip for each razored segment.

Premiere offers several trimming tools that make the process quicker. The Ripple Edit tool (hidden in the extended tools menu at the bottom of the timeline, it looks like

Next, place markers

Audio Editing

Beneath the video bands, rest the audio bands, which serve in the same way as repositories for audio clips. One Imports audio clips to the Library in the same manner as video clips. Still frames, such as TGA, BMP, TIF files may be imported as well, whereupon they are converted to freeze-frame elements of a specific length, stipulated by the preferences (default is 30 frames).

Effects and Transitions are selected from their own "library" windows. Simply "Load Transitions" or "Load Effects" from whatever subdirectory you've established on your system, and the windows are filled with small, animating icons that show what effect they will, uh, affect, when they are moved to the Transition/Effects band on the timeline. The icons, continuously performing their animated routines on your computer screen, are very effective in remembering their functions, but after awhile, I find them distracting and wish there was a way of turning the animations off.

Since Premiere is a mature software program with lots of third party support, your Transition and Effects subdirectories may be loaded with third party "plug-ins" that vastly augment the "standard equipment" library that comes with Premiere (see below for a few mini reviews of plug-ins).

The Editing Process

Editing, of course, is begun by dragging a picon from the Library to the timeline, where it automatically becomes a band whose graphical length is proportionate to its running time. If the user chooses, the band may be composed of actual video frames in the Mirage paradigm or the clip may be a colored bar with text and end frame picons.

If two clips are put in the same space on the timeline the last moved clip automatically hops down to the next video layer. This is a nice feature, not supported by some other editing software products, which instead, pop up an enigmatic message about overlapping clips not being legal. Adobe knows you want to execute a transition or that you are making a mistake, so it opts for the transition.

A cuts-only edit may easily be made by sequentially dragging clips to the timeline in play sequence. Clicking the "Play" button on the upper left corner of the screen will initiate a cuts-only playback of the timeline and any associated audio immediately, full-screen, on the TV monitor. However, the playback has a jumpy, skip-frame nature that has become a "trademark" shortcoming of Premiere. Clients who supervise Premiere edits need to be educated about this unintended effect. Smoother previews, with transitions and effects, can quickly be rendered in the small Preview window on the computer screen, but these previews are hard to see if the client is sitting on a couch in the back of the suite.

The only way a user can see a full-screen TV monitor rendition of the timeline with effects and transitions is if the Make Movie command is initiated, in which the final output is created in broadcast quality, but this may take several hours if the effects and transitions are numerous. This drawback is similar to most desktop nonlinear editing platforms equipped with single stream video codecs. Moma should have told you about this.

I find the fastest way to begin editing is to quickly slap (CAN ENTIRE SEQUENCES BE MOVED?) clips to the timeline and trim them there. Since this necessitates shortening the heads and tails of clips (You certainly cannot add anything to a clip that wasn't captured!), this may be done either by dividing the band, or moving the in and/or out point.
To divide the band, simply choose the Razor tool and click it on the timeline (or click the function, "Razor At Cursor" (NAME CORRECT?) to make a cut wherever the cursor sits. Once a band has been razored, both pieces appear as separate picons in the Library.

To trip the head or tail of a clip, the user simply click on the head or tail and a double arrow icon appears which may be slid left or right to change the beginning or end point of the edit. As the icon is slid, the corresponding video or audio is previewed on the TV monitor.

Premiere also supports a trimming window that features the border frames on either side of a cut. Delicate frame-by-frame trimming may be accomplished either with mouse or keyboard and even the edit point itself may be scrubbed left and right to effect a "rolling edit" where the end of one scene is cut equally to the length of the tail of the other being lengthened.

As each clip is trimmed, empty space begins to develop between bands. This may be closed up, by clicking within each clip (a dotted line around the clip indicates when it has been selected), and sliding the clip left to butt up to the clip before it. The user may specify a "snap to" effect in this action, which assures that each clip will adhere to its neighbor without dead space between.

I would appreciate the inclusion of an automated capability of eliminating the dead space as soon as the clip is trimmed, since the repeated effort of trimming and closing gaps is one that is ideal for a computer but tedious for a human.

Once the sequence of clips has been trimmed and re-butted, One can actuate a preview to see if the jerky version of the playback is more or less what was intended. If so, finer trimming and effects insertion is begun.

With fine trimming complete, the editor has a choice of adding effects upon a clip (Premiere calls these "filters") and adding transitions between clips. Premiere features a neat timeline that is free of unnecessary clutter. Since Premiere and most professional nonlinear editors offer unlimited layering of effects and filters, the problem arises of developing a very complex edit control screen.

Rather than stacking endless layers of video overlays on the timeline, Premiere allows for the creation of "virtual clips." These clips may contain an assortment of layered video and effects clips and are represented on the timeline as just one strip, which itself may be used as a simple clip in the timeline.

Transition Effects

Let's assume, for instance, that you want to create an ADO type move of a reduced video scene, playing within another scene. Some systems would have you lay both scenes out on separate bands and then to put an effect band between them. The effect band would, therefore, carry the ADO commands. Premiere, however, allows you to address the ADO effect within the band that identifies the shrunken scene and then to collapse them into the virtual clip whenever the details of the ADO need not be addressed.

The controls for such complex effects as an ADO type move are also quite intuitive and easy to execute the first time you try them. Simply click on a clip and choose Motion from the Clip pull-down menu. The Motion Settings dialog box appears. This comprehensive control screen features a preview window, to instantly show your results, a control window, which features a frame of the selected clip within a larger area that represents "off camera" zones from which the clip may originate or travel to during the process of a motion path execution.

Various buttons allow the user to preview motion paths, frame outlines, alpha channels and preview play controls. The lower half of the dialog box, features a cursor-actuated timeline, representing the duration of the selected clip. Two additional boxes display the clip's fill color (useful if the clip occupies less than the full screen area) and the distortion of the clip.

The default load of the dialog box places the selected clip within the central work area with two control points indicating the beginning position and ending position of the clip's movement, in this case, a horizontal move from left to right on a straight line between the two control points.

To execute a diagonal move into the viewing area and out, the operator merely clicks and drags the end points out of the active viewing area at opposite ends of the screen. Hit the play button and see the move executed in the preview window. Click on any point along the path to create a new control point, making a corner on the move. The control point appears simultaneously on the timeline where it can also be adjusted forward or backward. Unfortunately, curved paths are not supported nor are splined control points.

Distortions may also be achieved, creating perspective turns on the X, Y or Z axes, with each corner of the frame as well as the center being controllable. Obviously, with so many control points, elaborate twists and turns of the image are possible, with frame-accurate control.

Titles are created in Premiere within a special Title window, actuated through the File, New, Title menu pull-down sequence. The title control screen window features a large work area and a selection of tools running up the left border. These tools include a selection tool, for picking text blocks; an eyedropper tool, for selecting on screen colors as palette selections; a type tool for creating text; a line tool for drawing lines; a rectangle tool for drawing rectangular shapes; a polygon tool for drawing complex shapes; a rounded rectangle tool; an oval tool and a draft mode check box, which when selected
actuates all previews without color or opacity gradients which tends to speed up playback on computers which are minimally equipped. Kerning, the ability to adjust the space between letters in a title, is also supported. This is an important feature not found in Video Action NT or Adobe Photoshop.

Graphic superimpositions are created by dragging graphic clips to special timeline tracks called Superimpose ("S") tracks. Because Premiere assigns S tracks a later priority than video tracks, the S tracks will be formed as keys over the video, with higher numbered S tracks appearing over lowered numbered tracks.

Superimposed tracks may be prepared title sequences (titles on black or a chroma-key color background), graphics or even video clips that feature keyable background areas.

When it comes time to view a layered clip in detail, simply click and drag through the area of the timeline over your effect. Depending on the speed of your computer and the size you have specified for the preview window, your preview will be rendered in a few minutes or longer. This rendering is saved in a temporary file and is not to be confused with the final rendering that you will do when making a final movie. When the rendering is finished, the preview will play on the computer monitor with sound. If you like what you see, you can initiate the final rendering to a finished movie by initiating the "print to tape" command. Again, here Adobe still uses the syntax of Guttenberg to describe a medium which has nothing to do with printing.

Another Weird Bug In Premiere

Do you ever have to do videos that look more like slide shows? Every year we do a battery of Employee Benefits videos that due to budgetary and legal restrictions, end up having a lot of bullet-point builds.

In the old days, we whacked these out with a Video Toaster's CG module, but this time around chose Premiere's capability of importing TIF files from a paint program like Photoshop or Fractal's Painter.

When we did, all hell broke loose and it took us several long days (see my article in the February Videography, "Are You Mission Critical?" This was the bug that Intergraph couldn't solve.)

It turns out that if you use a single frame as a source file in Premiere, that the final rendering will crash. I repeat: The final rendering will crash. And when it does, it will not tell you what the reason was. It will give you an enigmatic message that will make you tear your hear out, kick the monitor in, cry and call technical support. And technical support will not have the answer either (at least not when I called. When I called, it was Saturday night and the client was coming to get the job on Sunday morning!)

If you want to make freezes and dissolve them to other freezes in Premiere, do yourself a really big favor. Dupe the single frame in your paint program for the full length of the effect, and bring them into Premiere as a sequence.

Plug Ins

While Premiere is quite complete in itself, requiring no further investment, advancing editors will be happy to note that Adobe has released its source code to third party developers who have been industrious in creating hundreds of really useful and inexpensive software products that enhance Premiere's capabilities.
Ultimatte

One of the most useful plug-in effects comes from Ultimatte, the folks who revolutionized chromakeying. I've worked in studios where you can order an Ultimatte machine to be added to the control room. It runs about $350 per day plus the cost of a playback VTR, but the effect of an Ultimatte can make your video. Put your subject in front of a green screen and the Ultimatte will replace the green with any video source you want (hence the need for the VTR). Do you want to make it look like your spokesperson is walking on the docks of Santorini? Feed some dock stock footage into the Ultimatte and presto, you can smell the Ouzo and gyros. You can even add the shadow of the spokesperson on the dock, if your operator is clever enough.
Well now, all this power is available to you in Premiere with the Ultimatte plug in. While Premiere features its own chromakey module, Ultimatte takes the science to fully professional standards. The software package even comes with a few swatches of colored paper to indicate the best tone to paint your background panels!

Featuring extensive documentation, Ultimatte provides a far wider range of controls and repair routines than Premiere's chraomakey, whereby all of the typical problems of chromakeying are addressed with sophisticated software. For instance, one problem is the effect of getting green light, spilling from the background material, on the front of the spokesperson (also called the foreground object). Ultimatte software offers a simple set of routines whereby this problem, called "green screen spill" is eradicated.

Perhaps you might wish to try the chromakey menus in Premiere a bit first and finding their limits. Then, if you find your own chromakey needs exceed Premiere, consider Ultimatte. I've found that one's needs stretch to fill the capability and not the other way around. Within the Ultimatte plug-in, your special effects imagination will find no limits.

Boris Effects
Whenever I get dressed in drag and cross the railroad tracks to listen to bayou jazz and get really twisted on foul injectables, I hear things about what people do with MAC computers. On my latest tom catting, while challenging the locals with my oft repeated harangue, "What can you do on a MAC that you can't do in Windows?" I heard about Boris Effects and was humbled. Boris Effects made a MAC into a virtual digital effects company town. The most thrilling and amazing collection of video tricks you've ever seen, and I couldn't get it for Windows!

Well, suburbanites, Boris Effects, from Artel Software, is now available on Windows platforms and it's made to plug in to Premiere (as well as Star Media's Razor Pro, Avid MCXpress and the new version of D/Vision). So keep the Rambler in the lot and the spaniel on the .RR--!----!----!----!----!----!----!----!----!----!----!-------------R
leash.

Boris effects offers hundreds of pre-configured 3-D video effects like the ones you enjoy on broadcast news and sports, plus the ability to customize your own effects. The flying slab effect, for instance, where the video falls back to reveal thick edges, like a slab of marble, is right there. You can spin, tumble and rotate, shrink, expand, cube and even composite video layers to your heart's discontent.

Every nonlinear editing package offers some degree of 3-D video control that is meant to emulate the old ADO or Quantel DVE black boxes. Boris Effects offers a standard interface that you can learn once and then carry from NLE to NLE. A great tool and well worth adding to your Chewbacca belt of action figures.

Rendering Out

When your timeline editing is complete and you've seen all the previews your eyes can stand, it's time to "compile a movie." This process converts all your work into Quicktime files that can be played, with varied results, on a wide range of computer screens.

Compiling a movie may be accomplished in portions, to test a particular area of the timeline, or as an entire project using a pull down menu that offers a host of choices to control such variables as frame rate, color palette, frame size, etc. All of these variables are necessitated by our industry's lack of coordination in terms of
establishing firm standards for hardware and software.

Back in the olden days of videocassettes, every VCR manufacturer had to conform to a strict standard of hardware. That way, when you put a VHS cassette into a deck, it would, wonder of wonders, play a video. This simple logic is not yet part of the computer industry (despite TV commercials featuring bunny-suited chipsters doing the boogie as they slice silicon). The upside of this headache is that you can output Premiere timelines to CD-ROMs and webservers as well as video, but figuring it out may take you as much time as the edit itself.

Another option is to "print to videotape," a concept that reminds me of the day when a documentarian friend of mine was caught by a Russian tank captain in Czechoslovakia and was allowed to live after he "exposed" his incriminating tape to the light of the noon day sun.

Printing to tape, using a professional quality video card like the Perception, yields results that could, above caveats not withstanding, be regarded as broadcast quality. On starting the process, a pop-up window informs you how long the process will take. Do not be surprised to see "ten hours" or more reported. Do not be surprised either to learn that the estimate fluctuates as the timeline hits your most creative passages. This meter is worthless.

So also, are the messages that pop up whenever the rendering process crashes. Here, once again, the nameless sociopath who designed the basic authoring windows of Windows has struck another powerful blow against the survival of the human race. If anything goes wrong at this stage (and it can go wrong just five minutes to the end of a six hour rendering) you will have obtained absolutely nothing of use. No backup file is created, no partial rendering is saved, nothing. And all the sociopath gives you is a screen saying something like, "Rendering Failed" with the ulcerating ridicule of the ever galling, "OK" button.

Perhaps I am a bit unkind in this assessment of Premiere's software engineers wrap up of an otherwise honorable creation. Maybe I ought to be more kind when I realize that these people probably never had to actually "print a movie" under a deadline or not eat for a month. Maybe I owe all their technical assistance staff a weekend off. But they don't work on weekends. I do. And when I hit a lousy software routine at the end of an otherwise logical stream of creation, and I want to find out how to rebuild the shattered dreams of a week of overnights when my kids forget what color hair I have, I'd like to be able to get someone on the phone who knows how to say something more than, "Maybe you don't have enough RAM," when I've already informed them I have 264 Meg, and I'd like to be able to get these questions answered at any time, round the clock, on weekends and holidays.

That, my friends, despite your petty arguments about what "broadcast quality," without apologies, is the PROFESSIONAL STANDARD and so far neither Adobe nor any other NLE system manufacturer provides it.
Strategies for Success

Perhaps I am spoiled by having virtually every NLE system at my disposal for review, but you may wish to know, what program(s) one would use, given that he had all of them to choose from. My answer, to date, is none of them and all of them. In simple fact, I have not found yet, the ideal NLE.

Premiere has significant pluses that one cannot find elsewhere. For simple two stream editing, it has an easy interface and can support some complex layering. It has the widest range of plug-in third party support, including Ultimatte and Boris Effects which is indispensable.

It's jittery playback, for client-supervised editing, is unsatisfactory, so on occasions where clients want to play Capt. Piccard, a wise Commander Riker switches to Avid, Razor or Video Action NT (VANT).

When real tricky compositing is required, we use Razor. When we need a little of everything and the client is watching, we use VANT.

Maybe, when I'm finished writing about each of the NLEs separately (assuming I ever catch up with the continuos stream of new products), I think a useful article would be a fair comparison of all the plusses and minuses of all the programs, side by side. But I think that by time, some brilliant editor, teamed up with a machine language programming genius (Bob Lentini, are you reading this?) will invent the ideal NLE and then we can all take a well deserved rest.

Until that time, Premiere will suffice for those of you with a mid range budget and above average clientele. It's a solid, full featured, well-supported program that represents the best in a particular category at a particular point in time.