Aug 16

Test Bench: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium Video Editing Suite by:  mike

08/16/2007 08:54 PM

Videomaker by Brian Peterson While there are certainly some welcomed improvements to Premiere, the real news of this upgrade is what surrounds it. Adobe clearly wants us to now think in terms of a unified software system. But since the fundamental component of this bundle is still the timeline editor, we're going to start our review with a look at what's new in Premiere. Premiere Proper Compared to the jump from Adobe Premiere CS to CS2 (see July 2006 Videomaker), the number of improvements Adobe has made to the core Premiere program in CS3 is rather low. The quality of those improvements, however, is very high. The big ones include Mac compatibility, variable-rate slow motion that produces an incredibly fluid effect, multiple project panels with improved search and organizing functions, and several editing and audio refinements. It's been a long time coming, but Mac users can now slice and dice with Mac OS X v.10.4.9 and newer, as long as it is running on a multi-core Intel processor. Boot Camp is required only for OnLocation. The new slow motion capabilities are easy to use and produce stellar results. You simply place a clip on the timeline, select Time Remapping from the Clip Effect menu and, by adding keyframes, you can smoothly increase or slow a clip's frame rate, even to the point of freezing a frame or reversing direction. The clip automatically gets larger or smaller on the timeline. Results from our first test looked similar to video shot with a high-speed camcorder and post processed with dedicated hardware. Sure, it's true that overall sharpness isn't comparable to that achieved with a dedicated high-speed system, but the new way Premiere is handling temporal interpolation is incredible. Can you tell that we were impressed? read more...


Email | Permalink