System requirements: Intel Pentium III 500 MHz processor The screen shot you see below is the first thing that pops up when you launch Adobe Premiere 6.5. Daunting? You bet! I did happen to know from previous employment that NTSC is the standard for digital video in this country and PAL is the European standard. It is reassuring to know that Premiere will handle both. |
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Limited prior experimental experience with version 4 (which did not accept long file names) gave me the courage to plunge into the breach again with today’s version of Adobe’s top-of-the-line digital video editing application. After a quick glance at the Overview chapter in the manual, I brought about 30 video clips into the project, put them in the Storyboard screen and selected the Automate to Timeline command. A few minutes later the clips showed up in the Timeline window ready to edit. Each of the 60-90 second clips previewed okay and didn’t really need me to add any transitions, so I told Premiere to go ahead and put the clips together to make a video in the .avi format. Now my system is a couple of years old (Athlon 1.2) and certainly not "hot" in comparison to today’s 2+ gigahertz processors, but I was still shocked when a progress dialog box/bar graph window popped open to announce that the movie-making process should be complete in approximately three hours. Hey! This is a computer, processing ump-teen thousand commands per second… and it’s going to take three hours? Holy Gigabytes, Cyberman, what have I gotten into? Next time I’ll wait until I’m headed out for a three-martini executive lunch before I tell it to Go. Or I’ll go for a one-hour movie and start the process before retiring for the night. In the mean time, I’m putting together much shorter videos. A three-minute video still takes about ten minutes to process from Project to Movie status. The great thing about Adobe Premiere 6.5 is that you can create your final video in many different forms or formats. For example, you can record a video program to tape, export it as a RealVideo file, Export it as a DV stream, and also export the same file as a QuickTime streaming or hinted video. Premiere can be used to capture digital video directly from the camera to the computer and then export an edited video back to the camera or to CD, videotape, or optimized for, and directly to, the Web. Adobe Premiere 6.5 enables you to do frame-by-frame editing of your digital video clips; including dozens of customizable transitions between frames and micro-mixing of the audio to go with them. You can export your clips as film strips to Adobe PhotoShop for digital editing of individual frames. The User Guide does an admirable job of explaining Premiere’s highly complex features. Still, as you can tell from the opening screen above, there is going to be a long, long learning curve to becoming a proficient editor of digital video, especially with an application as thorough and flexible at Adobe Premiere 6.5. Adobe Systems Incorporated |