It's funny how to the pace of progress sharpens our senses and lifts our expectations just in time to be ready for the next advance. Back when Premiere 1.0 debuted, Macworld gave it the highest rating, as much an endorsement of QuickTime as an endorsement of Premiere itself. In retrospect, however, it’s amazing how spartan the program really was. With the limitless expanse of digital-video editing at its disposal. Premiere adopted the staid but stalwart model of the double-deck studio. You had two choices. Fade from track 1 to track 2, or fade from track 2 to track 1 . Granted, you could superimpose an additional sequence, introduce still images and masks, and overlay sound tracks, but folks have been able to do that since “I Love Lucy.” Many experienced users were left wondering, besides the transition effects, where does the digital benefit come in?
But wouldn’t you know it, just as we’re ready for Premiere to be something better, it makes the valiant effort with version 3.0. Now instead of 2 video tracks, you can juggle as many as 99 — the original 2 plus 97 superimposed tracks — not to mention the same number of audio tracks. Premiere doesn’t overwhelm the senses by expanding the Construction window to nearly 200 rows. In fact, if you’re familiar with previous versions of Premiere, you’ll see the same familiar interface you saw in the past. But now you can increase your working space, using the Add/Delete Track command, and then drag a new video sequence into play. As always. Premiere has integrated this new capability so seamlessly that you’ll find yourself perfectly at home within minutes of removing the shrink-wrap.
Previews That Actually Work
Another of Premiere’s past problems that Adobe has remedied with version 3.0 is the pace of the previewing function. In previous versions, the preview typically showed you every third frame or so and occasionally hung up on an image for as much as a full second, hardly helpful in testing out subtle transitions and complex titling effects. Now you can preview a sequence at the maximum frame rate and size supported by your system. If your computer is equipped with a QuickTime acceleration board, such as SuperMac’s Digital Film or RasterOps’ MoviePak, you can use the board to process, scale, and speed up the preview. This means you can preview full-screen sequences directly to videotape rather than using the Print to Video command, great for quick fixes and last-minute demos.
Premiere makes previews faster by rendering the sequence to RAM or to a temporary disk file — your choice — prior to displaying the sequence on screen. First time out, the previewing process can be as time-consuming as making a QuickTime movie (of the same length as the preview). But each additional time you preview the same sequence, Premiere automatically abbreviates the rendering time by updating only those sections of the preview that have changed, a real bonus to users who find themselves previewing a sequence over and over as they fine-tune it. (I don’t know anyone who doesn’t work this way.) Premiere can even render a preview in the background, but this dramatically increases the amount of time it takes the rendering cycle to complete. For example, when I tried previewing a particularly complex scene while using Microsoft Word in the foreground. Premiere made almost no progress during a 20-minute interval.
Finally, you now have access to a second kind of preview called a snapshot, which adds a full suite of QuickTime playback controls and a few editing tools. Inside the Work Area Snapshot window, you can view specific frame transitions using the frame-by-frame controls. You can then mark a specific frame or insert a splice, either of which will take effect in the Construction window. The snapshot feature enables you to make precise changes that you simply can’t do using the standard preview function.
Interface Enhancements
Premiere 3.0’s interface enhancements range from the mundane to the dramatic. One example of the former is a revamped Project window that enables you to display imported video clips in various sizes and formats... You can specify the size and format options from a dialog box or use keyboard equivalents to toggle through the view settings. The feature is hardly revolutionary, but it is useful for organizing your stable of video clips into logical groups.
One of my favorite sections of the new Premiere is the enhanced Sequence window, in which you can rough out quick edits. For example, you can combine a couple of clips and save them to a new composite QuickTime movie without recompressing the clips and further degrading the images. You can even add sounds to movies that you recorded silently using a low-end board like SuperMac’s VideoSpigot. If you rely on the Sequence window for storyboarding, you can specify the order of your clips and then transfer all of them in a single drag to the Construction window, where you can then add transitions and other more demanding effects.
In response to special-effects editors VideoFusion and CoSA After Effects, Adobe has enhanced the Motion Settings dialog box to permit gradual transformations and distortions... In addition to rotating and scaling a sequence as it moves inside the frame — functions provided by version 2.0 — you can now distort the sequence so that it appears to fly through 3-D space. You can also change the rate at which transformations occur, so that they accelerate or decelerate at key intervals. Granted, Premiere doesn’t offer the kind of control you find in CoSA After Effects, but it’s a step in the right direction.
To keep up with Apple’s Sound Manager 3.0 and QuickTime 1.6.1 — both bundled with Premiere — version 3.0 offers support for 16-bit stereo, CD-quality sound. The program also offers device calibration so you can adjust attributes such as hue, contrast, and sharpness during the recording process. Both features are necessary to address the needs of professional digital-video editors.
Premiere 3.0 is so solid and dependable, it ought to be wearing overalls. Certainly, some folks might complain that the program looks a little stodgy compared with the likes of VideoFusion and After Effects. But by the same token. Premiere 3.0 offers by far the more structured, more flexible, and more responsive interface, all of which are ultimately more important to getting the job done. In a nutshell. Premiere remains true to its origins as a video sequencer first and an effects program second. This is one slow-and-steady turtle that will continue to win the race.
McClelland, Deke. (January 1994). Adobe Premiere 3.0. Macworld. (pgs. 48-49).
Adobe Premiere 3.0
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
80 / 
2020-03-20 / 
13ed9e66e3357e7ae2679fc61676d8454ff46a78 / 
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adobe-Premiere-3.0.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
