Adobe Premiere
Premiere is the application that I currently use in the production of corporate videos as a result of upgrading to a DV (IEEE 1394 Firewire) capture card. The card I use is the Truevision Bravado DV2000, which was developed in partnership with Radius. We have found the card to be a very good product and the Adobe Premiere software bundled with it represented excellent value-for-money at the time. For reasons I shall explain later, Premiere is currently the only option when looking at a DVE package to support this card. In terms of quality, edited footage looks virtually indistinguishable from the original raw footage when transferred back out to mini DV tape.
Having come to Premier after having used Ulead's Media Studio Pro, it was encouraging to see the familiar -timeline" display with both video and audio tracks presented on the screen. Premier allows the editor to have up to 99 video tracks and 99 audio tracks in a project. This allows you to achieve layered video effects (such as overlaying titles and stills as well as other video tracks) and sound-on-sound effects so that music, sound effects and narrations can be incorporated into a project. Video tracks can be displayed as a -filmstrip", where tiny thumbnails represent the frames that exist in a particular section of film. Alternatively, the user can select to show the filename only for each track, or the filename together with the first and last frame of each track. I personally prefer to view my video tracks as filmstrips. This can take a little longer to refresh on the screen when changes are made. With audio tracks, you have to ability to either show the waveform or not to show it.
With video editing, there are two key video tracks that are used to assemble a project. In Premiere, these are labelled track 1a and track 1b. Sandwiched between these two tracks are the transition tracks, where fades and wipes can be placed. Premiere's video overlay tracks (tracks 2 to 98) appear above the main video tracks. This is a more intuitive approach than that of Ulead's Media Studio in which the overlay tracks appear below the main A-B tracks.
However, Premiere does make the audio a little confusing because of the way they have labelled the audio tracks. A video placed into track 1a has its corresponding audio track placed into audio 1. A video segment placed into track 1b has its corresponding audio track placed into audio track 2. As a result, from this point on the number of the video track and its accompanying audio track do not correspond (eg. Video track 2 has its audio on audio track 3, and so on). Media Studio handles this better in my opinion, with video track Va having a corresponding audio track Aa, video track Vb having its corresponding audio track Ab, and then the resulting overlay tracks each having matching corresponding numbers (eg, Video track V5 corresponds with audio track A5, etc).
In addition to the main timeline window, Premiere also has a number of windows and palettes with which to work. At this point, it is worth mentioning that Premiere allows the user to customise the settings so that the work environment suits the working style of the individual.
The project window is where all of the needed files (video files, audio files, titles, stills, and other projects) are loaded and from here they can be dragged onto the timeline and positioned. The project window, like other windows in Premiere, can be customised to either show thumbnails of the files, or to show information in text form. I choose to use the latter as it provides the user with a great deal of information including details as to the type of file, file size, duration, and how many times that file appears in the project timeline.
Another available window is the transitions window that allows you to select which transitions are to be placed between the two main video tracks. A transition allows the scene to change from one track to another in myriad ways. The most commonly used of these is the cross dissolve where one scene -fades" into the next. However, Premiere provides over 70 transitions that can be used. In fact, many more transitions can be provided via -plugins" available either on the Web or from third-party providers.
When a transition is to occur between tracks A and B it is necessary to ensure that some overlap exists between these two video tracks (usually about 1 or 2 seconds). The transition will then -snap" to the correct duration when placed between these tracks. Double-clicking on them can further customise some transitions, but most of the standard Premier transitions only allow you to change start and end values and the direction in which the transition operates.
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