What is Adobe Premiere 5.0 + 5.1?

Adobe Premiere, the first QuickTime video editing app for the Mac, has lately been showing its age. The most recent version, 4.2, sported an outdated interface and lacked many features demanded by professional video editors, who have been moving to the fast, powerful hardware-based editing solutions offered by Avid, Media 100, and Radius.

That’s changed with version 5.0, Premiere’s best upgrade in years. Adobe has fixed most of the problems that plagued earlier versions, brought the inter- face up to date, and added powerful tools modeled on those featured in high-end editing systems. The overhaul has added a couple of problems of its own, but they are few and not very serious.

The most obvious change in Premiere 5.0 is the new Adobe-standard interface. The program now looks and acts a lot like the latest versions of Photoshop and After Effects. Although you can customize Premiere to look like version 4.2, we can’t imagine why you’d want to, because the new interface is cleaner and more intuitive.

Working with the old Premiere usually meant wading through a cluttered, sprawling mess of windows and floaters. In Premiere’s new incarnation, Adobe has consolidated all important controls in two compact windows that fit nicely on a 17-inch monitor. Rearranging and sorting sound and video clips is now a breeze, and the new timeline’s easily accessible tools and in-context menu are simple and direct. And Adobe has finally eliminated most of the silly idiosyncrasies that have plagued Premiere users for years. For example, bottom layers in the Project window no longer cover the ones on the top.

But the changes in Premiere 5.0 run a lot deeper. At the top of the new feature list is three- and four-point editing, a professional feature found on Avid and Media 100 systems. Previously, the only way to edit was to place dips on the Timeline and manipulate them there, a dumsy process when you were trying to be frame-accurate. In three- and four-point editing, you specify accurate In and Out points for the clips in the new Monitor window. Premiere then fits them into the Timeline for you, and does a surprisingly good job of it too, pushing clips aside or accurately splitting them in two when neces- sary to keep the integrity of the edits.

It’s now possible to edit an entire movie from the Monitor window without touching the Timeline at all. While this is not always the most efficient way to edit, it’s great for doing small, frame-accurate tweaks. In fact, the Monitor window contains a special Trim mode for doing just these sorts of fine adjustments. In Trim mode, Premiere intelligently ripples or rolls the edits throughout the rest of the movie, keeping every clip in sync.

In line with its effort to attract professional editors, Adobe has made some changes to the way Premiere 5.0 processes video. Most important, it now supports an accurate NTSC video time base of 29.97 frames per second (fps) — thereby solving Premiere’s longstanding sound-sync problem — as well as film time base (24 fps) and PAL video time base (25 fps). In addition, Premiere 5.0 can handle projects up to three hours long, so editing a feature film or positing and special effects — Adobe would much prefer that you use After Effects for that kind of work. But Premiere 5.0 effects have been enhanced in two significant ways. First, all video filters are now keyframable. Adobe has created a nice htde interface that directly relates your keyframes to the Timeline and makes planning complex effects much easier.

Second, the new scrolling text feature allows you to scroll text up or down or crawl it left or right. Premiere’s new Text box is easier to use and more powerful than before — you no longer need to go to Photoshop or After Effects to make credits for your video. (A minor bug inserts too much space between letters at certain point sizes; choose a slightly different size to get around this.)

Another pleasant surprise is the included training video. Created by Brian Maffitt of Total Training, it will get you up to speed on Premiere’s new features far more quickly than the manual will. We hope Adobe starts including these tapes with other products.

While eliminating the design flaws of Premiere 4.2, Premiere 5.0 does introduce a few of its own. Instead of the appropriately prominent Make Movie command in Premiere 4.2, the Movie command in Premiere 5.0 lurks in the File menu under Export. Unfortunately, that Make Movie command has become a hard-wired reflex for most Premiere editors; moving it created no appreciable benefit.

Also, Premiere’s on-the-fly playback needs further refinement. If your project contains just cuts, it will play back acceptably. However, effects and transitions won’t show up until you render a preview, process that has not speeded up much since version 4. Annoyingly, if you just move the clips a frame or two and make a new preview, Premiere laboriously rerenders the effects again, even if there have been no changes to the effects themselves.

Premiere 5.0’s new professional features and clean, unencumbered interface will rope in serious editors put off by the high price of hardware-based editing systems. There’s no doubt about it — Premiere 5.0 is a winner.

Anzovin, Raf. (September 1998). Premiere 5.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 42-43).

Download Adobe Premiere 5.0 + 5.1 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

At least 26MB of free RAM (recommended 44MB or more, depending on your project's size)

Mac OS 7.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver