Adobe Premiere 4.2 Information 

 

© Rich Young, 1997

RYoung097@aol.com 

 

Adobe Premiere was the first general-purpose desktop video editor and is now the standard. It is very full-featured if not especially straight-forward or accurate in every way. For example, the Construction Window previews only in whole number frame rates, making NTSC video editing difficult in some cases. Version 5.0 should fix the major problems. The program is nearly the same on the Mac, Windows and UNIX.

You may find it convenient to do all of your movie and soundtrack work in Premiere. Premiere for Windows is currently the best tool for converting between QuickTime and Video for Windows. In Premiere you can easily edit video and sound, color correct, batch projects, add custom keyframes and blur & resize with high quality to reduce compression artifacts. Media Cleaner Pro and Debabelizer are more convenient for some work. Media Cleaner Pro is especially nice for previewing movie settings. Media Cleaner Pro also has adaptive noise reduction, great batching ability and can suspend renders.

In this example, we'll use the Premiere for Macintosh CD-ROM Movie Maker interface to compile a movie that can be shown on any platform. In Premiere for Windows 4.2 there is no seperate module, but the same elements are in the Compression dialog box.

 
Setting Up the Project 

 
1. Open Premiere & start a new project (under File>New>New Project). Choose CD-ROM Mastering from project preset, although with CD-ROM Movie Maker you'll be changing all the presets.


2. Import your media (under File>Import>File).


3. Select graphic clips that need filtering and choose Clip>Filters (or option click on the clip). Look at the Levels filter and adjust the white & black points to where there are actually pixels. This tonal correction will make the compressed file look much better. Set audio filters in a similar way if applicable (CyberSoundFX & several of the SoundDesigner plug-ins are available for higher quality processing).



Cross-Platform Settings 

 

4. Choose Make>CD-ROM Movie. Well, this is it! This interface has all the controls you need to worry about (click on More Options if you don't get it all).

Shown above are the defaults for CD-ROM Movie Maker, but you'll probably need to tweak some of the parameters below:

• Compressor -- Cinepak (especially for motion) and Indeo 3.2 (try for talking heads) are still the most popular. Power!Video and Truemotion-S by Horizons are quite good but have been hampered by royalty requirements. MPEG usually requires a dedicated application & encoding hardware. If you use Cinepak or Indeo stick with 24-bit. You must have the same codec on the delivery platform. QuickTime codecs are the same on each platform; the only common codec between QT and Video for Windows is Cinepak.

• Frames per second -- 10-15 usually is fine for smooth motion and audio sync.

• Key frame rate -- 1 per second is average; more is better quality; Cinepak can be all keyframes (no setting). Add custom keyframes if your application stops video on certain frames.

• Data rate controls -- 200 kbs seems almost safe nowadays for Cinepak on a 2x drive; double that if the target market is 4x CDs.

• In Special Processing settings (pictured below) you'll find gamma correction (try .8; PCs are darker), blur slightly to spread values across sampling blocks (especially on Cinepak), definitely check better resize if scaling (or use After Effects), keep frame sizes in multiple of 4 (for Cinepak). Try deinterlacing in After Effects if Premiere gives you trouble.

• In audio settings be sure to choose an even multiple of 44.1khz to be PowerPC and SoundBlaster compatible. You might convert sound formats in audio programs that open movie formats (most programs on the Mac; only Sound Forge on PCs). Also, Premiere does not access QuickTime's very useful IMA compression engine -- Media Cleaner Pro, Sound Edit 16 & MoviePlayer do.

• Don't bother checking Playback Palette Controls. It slowly generates a nearly useless CLUT resource that only MoviePlayer and few programmers use. In delivery to 15 or 16-bit platforms, Debabelizer may come in handy to pre-dither before final compression.

• CD-ROM Movie Maker automatically flattens the QT movie (you can also use MoviePlayer, flattenmoov or a number of other applications). Flattening puts certain file resources into the data fork of the file instead of the resource fork. If you are using a version of QT before QTW 3.0 and the movie is not flattened, the the frames will be white in Windows, since Windows does not support file reources as such (that's why there are no previews in Open dialogs in Windows).

• If you use CD-ROM Movie-Maker you won't have access to the Optimize Stills feature in the regular Output Options (on the Mac). Optimize Stills is a handy QuickTime feature that lets you create slideshows with audio locked to video (stills of long durations). Locking audio to video for different machine types in Macromedia Director otherwise is near impossible, so this feature can be very practical!

 

Analysis and Batching Tools 
 

6. Premiere also has decent movie analysis features. Pictured below is the Data Rate Analyzer. Choose File>Tools>Data Rate Analyzer to select files to analyze. Remember, your movie shouldn't exceed the delivery target's data rate. You can interactively spot which frames are exceeding your data rate by dragging the thumbnail movie slider or by scrubbing the graph. Click the analysis button to get info on the codec and other useful stuff, but beware of averages. If you have real problems get professional help -- from MovieShop & MovieAnalysis (unsupported apps from Apple). MovieShop does not run on all PowerPCs; also, promise not to let it touch 16-bit sound! Premiere for Windows has a similar tool, but only for AVI/VfW files. If you're stuck on Windows without Premiere and need more information on your movie try Video Compression Sampler from Doceo Publishing (VidEdit from Microsoft is unreliable).

 

7. If you want to batch in Premiere, you'll have to save each project seperately. Choose File>Tools to access batch controls. If most of your projects are in Premiere, the batch functions will be great. If not, you can find comfort in Media Cleaner Pro's drag & drop batching -- also great for testing multiple settings on the same movie. Media Cleaner Pro also has suspend render and noise filtering features, but will probably not make your movie much smaller than Premiere or MovieShop (the champ).

 

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Comments or suggestions welcome at RYoung097@aol.com

SFSU Multimedia Studies Program