Premiere 6.5's editing screen consists of a number of free-floating windows that contain such tools as a video preview and the all-important timeline and storyboard. The basic operation of Premiere is to load in a series of video clips taken from a camera or a CD, or previously stored on your hard drive, and then drag and drop icons for them onto the timeline. You can then add a soundtrack, transitions, effects, and titles. When all is complete, export the finished video in a format suitable for use on a DVD, Video CD, or for the Internet.

Premiere 6.5 introduces several new features, the most useful of which is probably real-time preview. The ability to see the edits you've made to your video before you render the final version is a huge timesaver. While this feature has previously been available using special hardware, this is the first time it's been available from within the software. You need a fairly powerful PC to take full advantage of the real-time preview. You'll also need a computer with two hard drives, one to hold Premiere and the other for your video files.

Being able to add well-designed titles can make the difference between an amateur and a professional production. Adobe's new Title Designer, included in Premiere 6.5, provides many of the tools users of Illustrator and Photoshop will recognize to add text, rules, and shapes as overlays to videos. Adobe has bundled 90 fonts with Premiere 6.5, selected to produce clear and attractive titles.

Adobe produces a series of effects plug-ins that can be used with Premiere (sold separately as After Effects). Five of these effects (channel blur, blend, lightning, ramp, and twirl) are now included standard with Premiere 6.5, adding to the appeal of this very attractive package. --Simon Williams, Americancivilwar.co.uk

Premiere 6.5 offers powerful and precise editing tools to create broadcast-quality video productions. Use real-time preview to instantly view effects, transitions, titles, motion, and transparency. Drag and drop clips in the storyboard to quickly lay out projects and rearrange as necessary. Use new Adobe Title Designer to create broadcast-quality title sequences. View all project settings in one convenient location with the settings viewer. Work with hundreds of predefined text and object styles, or create your own custom styles.

Premiere 6.5 supports a wide range of DV devices, including Sony DVCAM gear and the latest camcorders and decks. Use DV device controls for pre-editing tasks before bringing clips into Adobe Premiere. Enjoy native support for Windows XP, and easily move projects between the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Finally, output your video productions to DVD and other leading video formats.

- Editing is all about cutting and not fancy effects. The strength of the project is what is in front of and behind the camera not fancy effects.

I would never recommend using any of the effects on any of the non-linear video editing packages anyway. Get dedicated effects packages if you really want to do your special effects well.

In short Adobe Premiere is the BEST cutting software and the EASIEST to use. The learning curve is slightly steep but you will be cutting your footage within a day or two with this one.

An editors cuts and arranges media. Adobe Premiere does that perfectly. I recommend this like no other but if you are looking for pro packages then go elsewhere and be prepared to pay five figures.

First of all, this program is quite complex, and it is not intuitively obvious how to use this product or how to find a productive workflow. I tried using the supplied 6.0 userguide however I got frustrated pretty quickly.

I also ordered a SAMS Teach Yourself book for 6.5, and again became frustrated. It was obvious to me that the "drag and drop" interface can hardly be described by a book.

Luckily the product came with a video DVD called "Introduction to Adobe Premiere 6.5" by Total Training. I watched this video for an hour or two and shadowed some of the instruction on my own footage. I was able to produce a passable editing job on a five minute production after two hours (excluding time to capture footage), interleaving watching the Total Training video and trying some of the moves shown on the video on my own footage.

I bought the follow-up 16 hours of Total Training instruction for another $131 (including postage). If I get through this video instruction, I will have a pretty good handle on the product, but by no means an expert.

Premiere 6.5 is chock full of features, which means there's still plenty to learn six months or a year down the road. What is a little disconcerting about this product is all the "new features" that came with 6.5, however some of these features have already been available for some time in much cheaper software packages.

For example, I did not buy the bundle including DVDit, and Premiere 6.5 itself can't burn to DVD without having DVDit installed. Instead, I create the MPEG video and audio files using Premiere, then import files into a much cheaper video editing package that came with my DVD burner to complete the DVD burn. Hmmm. And now I'm supposed to fork out $300 for DVDit on top of paying for Premiere - I don't think so.

The bottom line is you can produce fairly professional results with Premiere 6.5. The big question is do you want to invest the 20 hours effort to learn the not so intuitive interface and working methods?

Well, I bought Premiere 6.5 with a firewire card for $200 so I'd say it's well worth it. And if another $130 worth of video training by Total Training and 20 hours effort to get me up to reasonable speed on most of the features I would ever use in Premiere, then $330 for software and training is a pretty good deal.

By the way, Adobe customer service seems to be pretty good. You can call them for up to 30 days after buying the product. After that, you have to pay for support. I never did like this pay for support idea, since basically your paying them because their manuals aren't so good or their software is not easy to use. And sometimes your paying them to report a bug in their software.

Ernesto
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