Adobe upgrades Premiere & AE - Video

Post, August, 2003

SAN JOSE, CA -- Adobe (www.adobe.com) has upgraded its Premiere nonlinear editing application with the introduction of Premiere Pro, designed specifically for the Windows XP operating system. According to Adobe Premiere product manager Bruce Bowman, the new release will ship in August and addresses many of the perceived shortcomings within the tool, most the notably render-free editing and full-resolution realtime playback.

Adobe has licensed technology from Synthetic Aperture to provide three-point color correction within Premiere Pro. The tool now supports all video formats, including QuickTime, and allows for multiple timelines, which can be nested within one main timeline.

The new release features tighter integration with Adobe's After Effects (now upgraded to V.6.0 release) compositing and animation tool, along with customizable keyboard short cuts.

Premiere's audio capabilities have been enhanced for importing and exporting 24-bit, 96kHz sound files. Sound can also be edited down to sub-frame measurements for pop and click removal.

Premiere Pro now offers VST plug-in support, allowing users to take advantage of the many popular audio processors that are available. In addition, Adobe has included 17 VST plug-ins licensed from Spectral Designs, including reverb, EQ, pitch shift, dynamics, DeNoiser and multi-band compressor.

Device control within Premiere has been improved. With the scene detection controls, users can divide raw DV footage into scene-based clips and create low-rez, scene-based clips for offline editing. After assembling a rough cut, they can batch capture full resolution versions of the clips they need. The tool can also export AVI and MPEG files for use in Adobe's Encore DVD authoring tool.

Premiere Pro will be priced at $699. Existing Premiere users will be able to upgrade to the new release for $199. Adobe is also making a "Video Collection" available containing After Effects, Premier Pro and Encore DVD. The package will have a 90-day introductory price of $799, which will then go up to $999. A "Pro Collection" will be available this month as well ($1499), containing After Effects Pro, Premiere Pro, Encore DVD and Photoshop.

The company also recently introduced Version 6.0 of its After Effects compositing, animation, effects and motion graphics tool. The new release is designed for the Mac OS, Windows 2000 and Windows XP platforms and includes a number of performance improvements as well as Open GL support.

A Photoshop-styled text engine allows for the easy animation of type. Open GL support makes 3D compositing tasks fluid and interactive. The new paint engine is vector based and brings Photoshop-styled brushes and cloning capabilities to the tool. New effects tools include Liquify, Warp and Scribble. Dust and scratches can also be made less noticeable through controls similar to those found in Photoshop.

Pricing is $699 for the standard version and $999 for the professional version.