Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 product reviews

Truely amazing. The last time I used this little application, only a high-end Mac really did it justice... the PC version was slow, clunky and awkward... that was many a sad year ago, and the modern incarnation is astounding, and so simple to use.

As a quick starting trial, I decided to see how easy it was to use without having to wade through the 500+ pages of manual... so grabbing a DivX-encoded AVI movie, I tried to snip out a 5-minute scene from near the middle. Loading the movie in was no problem... simply a drag-n-drop from Windows Explorer into the Assets bin. All decoding, interpretting, etc is done automatically and almost transparently. This means that the user isn't flooded with overly-technical gobbeldeegook that really doesn't need to appear unless there is a serious error.

After selecting fade-in and fade-out points on the movie timeline panel, I was able to use the 'Cut at this marker' option to snip the movie into three sections, the wasted start and finish, and the desired sequence. After that, it was as simple as select an unwanted portions and hit -delete- to remove it! Click-&-hold'ing the remaing section, I was able to drag it to the start of the timeline then erase all the now-empty timeline section, and begin the export filter.

This allowed me to save out just the scene I wanted, and presented me with a huge array of formats and options to choose from, I was lost for hours exploring all the available settings, fine-tuning them for maximum compression with minimal loss of quality.

After repeating this process a few times, selecting raw footage from such sources as my webcam, a streamed-video from the internet, some AVI's, a couple of MPegs, and even a few QuickTime MOVies butchered around for compatibility, I started to assemble a movie montage, making good use of Photoshop and the latest version of After Effects Pro (both of which come bundled with Premier in the Production Studio package) to really enhance and overlap some of the footage, finally merging it all into one final movie. It was so simple and intuitive that I had trouble believing the end result was really my work, and not a sample!

Overall, I was highly impressed with this little application, and it has opened up some wonderful creative ideas, now that I know just how smart, but simple to use it is. All my old video footage still on the camcorder tapes will soon be on DVD thanks to Premier methinks. I would have done this a lot sooner if I had the chance, but it's new snap-together workspace model, so well used within the Production Suite really has made a lot of difference. Well done Adobe, you're clearly leading the pack here... this leaves Pinnacle's offerings crawling behind in the dust. Even though I have only begun, I can see the power inherent in the application and I look forward to really stretching it's limits, and mine.