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Adobe has reentered the Professional software based editing world with the new Premiere Pro 2.0; as a stand-alone program or as a tightly woven member of the Adobe Production Studio.

The programmers and engineers at Adobe have been busy since the release of Premiere Pro 1.5 about two years ago. The full number upgrade is packed with new features--many that bring Premiere Pro 2.0 into the realm of other high-end editing programs and a few that project it beyond. We don't have room to investigate the many new changes on these pages, but we'll look at some of the major ones.

What's New?

One of the first differences experienced Premiere Pro users will notice is in the GUI (graphic user interface). The new interface wastes no desktop space and more importantly, eliminates overlapping windows. Adobe now calls these windows "panels," which are dynamically attached to each other. Making one panel bigger, say your Timeline, makes its neighboring panels, for example the Source panel and the Program panel, shrink. This, coupled with the ability to pull panels from one frame and group them in another frame gives editors strong control of their workflow.

The most surprising, dare we say revolutionary, new addition to this upgrade is called Clip Notes. If you need to share footage with other editors and/or clients, Clip Notes is astonishing. Imagine effortlessly embedding a video clip into a PDF file for easy emailing. Now imagine the ability of the receiver to type in frame-accurate comments into this optionally password-protected document and email it back to you, the editor. You now import the Clip Notes document into your sequence and your program generates markers at the appropriate timecode locations on your timeline. We must admit, this innovation caught us by surprise.

Adobe Bridge allows editors to browse video and audio clips as well as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects files in one central area. Bridge not only lets one preview media such as AVI files directly in the Bridge window, but it also lets users enter a host of metadata information that makes searching for footage much easier. Organization is the name of the game on big projects so we very much welcome this functionality. Other major editing platforms take note. You can also drag media straight from Bridge into the Project window.

It's obvious that the After Effects coders and designers have been sharing notes with the Premiere programmers, as many of the Premiere effects interfaces closely resemble the After Effects GUI. From "twirly," triangle drop-down handles to BA?A©zier Handles for greater key frame control; advanced effects users will surely embrace these changes. Plus, if you're using the Production Studio, the powerful Adobe Dynamic Link enables you to share various elements between AE and Premiere Pro. For example, an animation designed in AE and imported into Premiere Pro can be used without first rendering it in AE and can be changed in AE with the changes porting over to Premiere Pro automatically. This will speed up the workflow tremendously.
The Improved

We were happy to see that Premiere Pro 2.0 had greater DVD creation tools from within the editor than version 1.5. Now menus and submenus can be created, animated backgrounds and looping background audio can be added, a DVD Marker button appears in the DVD Layout interface for easy menu marking and the program ships with a number of templates; not bad. We would still prefer to author our DVDs in Encore DVD, but greater control is now available in Premiere Pro 2.0.

The New Adobe Title design layout took a bit to adjust to, but once we got accustomed to the workflow, we were titling with ease. Template style choices for quick and easy titles as well as more sophisticated tools should please beginner through advanced users without needing to leave Premiere for most titles.

Conforming audio has been a bit of a sore issue with Premiere users. 2.0 gives editors more, though not complete, control on what gets conformed, where the conformed and original media files live and new abilities to manage them. The conforming process was introduced to give editors more latitude with their audio files but having more say in this process is welcome..

Premiere's audio editing interface supplies most of the audio needs of a video editor can be found in Premiere's audio editing interface, but for those who need deeper fine-tuning control, audio clips can be sent to Adobe Audition with a simple menu pull-down command..

Adobe Media Encoder now comes with the ability to output Flash video (FLV), which makes sense as Adobe recently made the hefty purchase of Macromedia. If one considers that 98% of desktops around the world currently have Flash Player installed (according to Adobe,) the overall high quality of the compression and the ability to embed Flash Video directly into a Web page, then this is a great feature.

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