Adobe Video Collection 2.5

Premiere Pro 1.5, Encore 1.5, and After Effects 6.5

By Mike Caputo

July 1, 2005    Source: Studio Monthly

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.)

PREMIERE PRO 1.5

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.

Project Manager

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.

Improved Color Correction

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.

Panasonic 24PA and HD Support

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.

AFTER EFFECTS 6.5

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

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.

Smart Advice

• You can override all effect values manually. Automatic values
• often get you most of the way there, but you’ll still want to finish
• the task with a little manual tweaking to get something that looks not
• just good but great.
• 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.

Improved Motion Tracking

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.

Animation Presets

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.

Interactivity with Premiere Pro

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.

Create Motion Menus for Encore

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.

Smart Advice

• To see your After Effects results back in Premiere Pro, the
• composition needs to be rendered and imported to Premiere Pro.
• 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.

ENCORE DVD 1.5

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.

Photoshop CS Integration

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.

QuickTime File Support

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.

Background Transcoding

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.