Disguised as a software suite, the Adobe Video Collection v2.5 is
really a virtual turnkey workstation. Packed with five of Adobe’s most
powerful applications, this suite runs well on a modest contemporary PC
that likely costs less than the suite itself, and morphs that PC into a
solid audio- and video-editing and DVD-authoring workstation. Included
in the package is Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5 Pro, Encore DVD
1.5, Audition 1.5, and Photoshop CS. This review covers Premiere Pro
1.5, Encore 1.5 and After Effects 6.5.

While most mid-range contemporary PCs would have enough horsepower to
run this suite, a more well-equipped PC enables them (and you) to
really fly. Real-world minimum specs include a computer with a 3.0 GHz
or faster Pentium 4 processor, at least one gig of RAM, a FireWire
jack, and a DVD burner. Ample disk space is required, especially if
you’ll be capturing and editing video. An 80 GB boot drive that holds
Windows and the applications should be enough, and another drive with
at least 120 GB should be designated for video and project files. With
any of these specs, more or faster is always better. (Stay tuned for a
review of Audition 1.5 in a future issue.)

Thanks to Adobe Premiere’s long history, a tale too long to recount
here, one expects a great deal from a product that made it all the way
up to version 6, dropped Macintosh support and changed its name.
Premiere Pro 1.5 lives up to expectations. A favorite video capture and
editing tool among the PC crowd for years, Premiere Pro 1.5 introduces
numerous new features aimed squarely at the higher-end crowd.

Editors that need to archive projects for sharing or simply for backing
up can now take advantage of Premiere’s Project Manager. Taken from a
page in the After Effects book, this feature is basically a "Save
As…" function that lets you copy related files along with the project
file into a new folder. Project Manager provides an excellent path for
consolidating a project and related files onto one hard drive, for
example, and handing that over to your assistant for more work (like
sound tweaking), or for those clients who want a copy of the project
for themselves.

Premiere now includes a set of popular filters designed to facilitate
color correction by automating the process as much as possible while
keeping a large amount of manual control within the tools. These
filters are also designed to look and feel like their familiar
Photoshop counterparts.

"Auto Levels," "Auto Color" and "Auto Contrast" are self-explanatory,
however the name doesn’t tell you that you can override all effect
values manually. Each one’s automatic values often get you most of the
way there, saving tons of time. But you’ll still want to finish the
task with a little manual tweaking to get something that looks not just
good but great.

Premiere Pro 1.5 upgrades its support of 24p by adding true Panasonic
24PA support throughout the capture, edit, render and output pipeline,
letting you shoot, capture, edit and output to tape at 24 frames per
second. Combine this with Premiere Pro’s new support for HD content
(hardware permitting) and you can work in 480p, 720p and 1080i
resolutions. Film purists may have found their new ideal tool.

Adobe After Effects, a favorite compositing and animation tool in
nearly every animation, video, and film studio, gets bumped up to
version 6.5 with some very welcome new features.

FireWire preview means you can now mirror the contents of the
composition window through a FireWire port on a broadcast monitor. An
analog/digital converter is still needed between the monitor and the
FireWire port-most DV cameras will do this, or you can buy a dedicated
A/D converter box. Even if the project is being rendered in HD, the
ability to preview it for yourself or clients while the job is in
progress on a broadcast monitor provides instant and valuable feedback.

Preview speed depends solely on the speed of the host system. An older
or slower computer can easily provide simple frame previews with only a
short delay but wouldn’t be able to handle showing a 30 fps movie
preview. Naturally, a contemporary PC with ample RAM, a fast system
bus, fast hard drives and a fast processor can easily handle full
resolution, full motion (720 x 480, 30 FPS) movie previews.

Matching CG elements to live-action camera movement has always been a
challenge, but the improvements to After Effects’ Motion Tracker makes
these types of projects much easier. You can now use as many tracking
points as you have memory and processor power for, and the new tracker
can track changes in scale or horizontal-only or vertical-only
movement. Also new is the "instant zoom" feature, which takes a little
getting used to. But once you learn it, you’ll wonder how you worked
without it. When clicking and dragging a tracker point, the cursor
instantly zooms in 400 percent and displays a postage stamp box around
the tracker point, boosting accuracy of tracker placement.

You could think of "animation presets" as pre-built but customizable
animated properties. As with the auto-color correction tools in
Premiere, these are true time savers and foundation builders. You could
think of them as a quick way to get an interesting look, but you’d be
limiting yourself.

If every After Effects artist is akin to a cook, and has favorite
"recipes" for letting him cook up great effects, then think of the
Animation Presets palette as a spice rack. Although After Effects comes
with over 200 presets, creating your own is as easy as dragging and
dropping selected keyframes into the Presets palette. Imagine shelves
and shelves of presets that can be applied to favorite effects, or
animated masks or motion, or just about any layer property that can be
keyframed. These presets can be simple or complicated, and are applied
with a simple drag and drop onto a layer. Sprinkle a few of your
favorite presets, and kick it up a notch!

Presets also facilitate consistency throughout a project or across a
team. Because presets are saved as small files on disk, they can be
copied to a flash drive or emailed to all artists working on a project,
thus ensuring that the same effect, animation or mask is applied no
matter who the After Effects artist is or where they are sitting.

New to After Effects 6.5 is the ability to import specific sequences
from Premiere Pro project files, saving the need to render or export
large video clips from Premiere. This works the same way that importing
Photoshop files as compositions do; a composition is created that takes
on the specs of the Premiere Pro sequence (resolution, frame rate and
duration) and any clips or files referenced in the Premiere Pro project
are imported to the After Effects project.

This is not a two-way street, though. The Premiere Pro project or
sequence is not being referenced in the After Effects project after
import. The import process makes a copy of the sequence, and converts
it to an After Effects composition. The net result is that you can’t,
for example, start working in a Premiere Pro project, bring that into
After Effects for special visual sweetening and then switch back to
Premiere Pro and view your changes. To see your After Effects results
back in Premiere Pro, the composition needs to be rendered and imported
to Premiere Pro.

After Effects 6.5 also integrates smoothly with the next package in the
suite, Adobe Encore DVD, by importing Encore DVD menus and letting a
designer add visual effects to them, and by transforming groups of
layers in a composition into buttons for use in Encore DVD. Designated
layers become button states in Encore DVD, making it easy to build
something more animated than a plain rollover.

Adobe Encore DVD, Adobe’s DVD authoring application, completes Adobe’s
line-up of dynamic digital media content creation tools. By seamlessly
importing Photoshop files and video clips, Encore DVD gives DVD
designers a chance to strut their stuff. This update rolls in
integration with Photoshop CS (reviewed in our May issue) and adds some
important new features missing from the nascent 1.0 version.

Almost every graphic project gets its start in Photoshop, so it
behooves any application that falls downstream to integrate with it as
smoothly as possible. Encore DVD 1.5 has stepped up to that plate with
seamless Photoshop CS import ability, including non-square pixel
support and nested layers. Nested layers let a designer build menus and
button states and keep everything grouped in a logical fashion. If
Encore’s naming conventions are used for layers in Photoshop, these
will be treated as button states (selected, non-selected, activated,
etc.) when imported to Encore.

A glaring omission from version 1.0, QuickTime file support has been
added to Encore DVD 1.5. QuickTime video files can be imported like any
other imported media, and can then be encoded to MPEG-2, or QuickTime
audio files can be transcoded to Dolby Digital audio.

With today’s fast processors and hard drives and gigs of RAM, a lot of
CPU cycles are wasted while waiting for the user. Encore DVD 1.5 takes
full advantage of this encoding files to MPEG-2 or audio tracks to
Dolby Digital while the designer forges ahead with building menu pages.

There are a million more cool features that I didn’t even touch on
here. This is a value-packed suite of applications that turns a
contemporary off-the-shelf PC into a turnkey video/audio/DVD authoring
workstation.