Premiere 6.5 First Look

Premiere 6.5 First Look

Real Time Previews, New Titling Tool, DVD from the Timeline. Hee-Haa!

By Charlie White

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Adobe Premiere 6.5 is still in its last stages of Beta testing, and Digital Media Net had a chance to take a long hard look at build 185 of the soon-to-be-released nonlinear editing software package. Since the application is still in Beta, this report will not be a full-blown review -- let's just call it a "sneak peek." What we saw was an application that looks like it's ready to ship, with new features that make it easier for users who don't feel like springing for an extra $1000 DV acceleration card. The big news is real time previews of all the effects Premiere can do, along with a new titling tool, Mac OS X compatibility and MPEG-2 compression from the timeline.

At this writing, even though it looks like you can buy Premiere 6.5 on Adobe's Web site, alas, all you can do is pre-order it. But if you're thinking about doing just that, reports of when Premiere 6.5 will be released are conflicting. Some sources say the end of this month (August, 2002), while others say it ships in the third quarter of this year, which could place it in your hands by the end of September. Either way, you'll pay $549 for a full Mac or Windows version. If you want to upgrade from a previous version of Premiere, it's $149 Mac/Windows, and if you have a copy of Premiere LE, the upgrade will cost you $299.
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Click for enlargement -- Screen Shot of Adobe Premiere 6.5

The most important aspect of this release is its real time previewing capability. After testing it extensively, I can tell you that it works as advertised, and previews your effects especially well if you're using a quick machine. I tested the software with a 2.53 GHz Dell PC, which was able to crunch through just about any effect I could throw at it in real time. But the effects don't look perfect, because the technique used here one where the frame rate is degraded automatically when the processor is unable to keep up with playback. So, what you get is a good-looking dissolve if that's the only effect you're using at the time, a fair-looking dissolve if there's a text key stacked on top, but a choppy-looking preview of a 3D transition. But still, it's good enough to see what you're getting. Remarkably, slow-motion real time previews looked best in our testing, appearing almost as if they had been rendered.

So, if you don't happen to have a DV editing card, you don't have to play any more guessing games when you want to add an effect or two to your work. Of course, if you want to see how the effects will look at their best, you can always render as you go. However, there's a catch. Unlike competitor Vegas Video 3, and like Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress DV 3.5, you can't see any of these real time previews on an NTSC monitor. If you're looping through a DV camcorder and looking at an NTSC monitor, when the real time effects start after hitting the Enter key, all you see on the NTSC monitor is an X. But on the computer monitor, that's where you can see the real time previews. And, unlike when you're using the newest DV capture cards like the Canopus DV Storm or Matrox RT.X100, you'll have to render all your effects when you want to send the finished footage back to DV tape. Even so, this real time preview capability represents a major advance for Premiere, and of course, as processor speeds increase, you'll be able to preview even more layers at higher frame rates.

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