Adobe Premiere Pro Review

by Hetal Thakkar • Edited by Debi Terry

Description

Adobe Premier Pro is an application used to edit, manipulate and export videos projects. It is useful for syncing multiple camera tracks on the time code, editing exposure and color using a variety of tools. One can add a variety of camera and lighting effects to projects, add title sequences and export sequences in various high definition and web-friendly formats. 

The simple video editing software, which can be used to import multiple videos, edit them, by cutting, adding simple effects and export them to make your own short film.

Premiere allows you to import photos, videos, audio anything, and the common file format supported are:

video: 3gp, mts, dv, avi, mov, mp4 and many more

image: jpg, png, gif, psd, tiff, and many more

audio: mpeg, mpg, mov, wma, aif and many more

You can find out more on file formats supported, here

Access

Can get a 30 day free trial that comes with 2G of storage. Also can apply for an Adobe Creative cloud account.

                                   Individually                                                                                               Student/Faculty

Single App:                 $19.99/monthly                                                                                             n/a

All Apps:                     $49.99/monthly (yearly commitment)                                                        $29.99

All of these offer 20 GB of cloud storage.            

Existing US customers save 40% on first year - $29.99 per month

Education Team / Small Workgroup $39.99 per month, per user

Business Teams $69.99 per month, per user

Sample Usage

Walk through:

First screen that pops up

Selecting the new project, will lead you to make  a new project, open project will help you open already existing premiere file, i.e. prproj file ( .prproj is the extension of premiere project files that are saved in editing mode)

This is the second video that pop's up once you select the new project. The three main choices are video, audio and capture: where in you can select the system in which you would like to see your video, and audio files and in which system you would like to capture you output file or edited version of file.

You may also rename you file in the name section and change the location of saving your file here.

(The file name will not be the name of you exported file, it will be the name of you premiere file)

This screen defines your video resolution which you can select from varied options listed with the description on the right.

The sequence name is the name of your output sequence which you will make out of editing your files.

You can change it here, or when you are exporting the file you are given the chance to change the file name.

You can also select tracks tab from the window and create number of tracks you want to work on, by default premiere will create 3 tracks for both audio and video

This window above is the main work space for editing, you can select the workspaces from the main menu windows option. Mostly editing workspace is used for simple video editing

In the video editing work space project window is where file is imported in the sequence you created, once you import the files, drag them to the timeline to the right.

Just besides the time line are the tools like selection (to select a track), razor (to cut), pen tool (to cut a specific area in any shape you may wish to), stretch tool to stretch the timeline( which will cause a video to slow down)

What the Tool Does Well

• Easy to work with other adobe applications such as Photoshop. It can use native psd files

• Easy to understand if you have used other Adobe applications

• Mac and PC compatible

• Works with almost all video audio and image formats

• Flexible workspaces

• Since it is commercially used software, there are many forums and tutorial videos available

• Dark User Interface cuts down on eye strain

• Flexibility to just buy it for the time that you need it

• Color items on the timeline (New Feature)

• Intuitive for editors switching from Final Cut Pro or Avid. Even accpets files from the two

• Cloud storage eliminates need for external storage eg. on external drive

• Can synchronize all settings, workspaces, preference keyboard shortcuts to Adobe Creative Cloud and deploy to any machine by logging in using Adobe ID

• Newly added paste attributes functionality

• It integrates seamlessly with other creative suite applications such as AfterEffects, Photoshop (so you can use native psd files), and Adobe Story to add scripts that improve video SEO (new feature)

What it Does Poorly

• Expensive, free trial is for the month, but does not include all the functionality

• Needs high end system specifications, and at times degrades the performance of the system

• Crashes at times but auto save option available to recover them, still not a good point if the system hangs.

• You have to know video editing terms and video configurations before using this software, not a software for a layman

Additional Resources

Adobe website resources: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/premiere-pro-cs5-cs55-tutorials.html

You can check out different videos provided on Adobe website to know more about tools.

you can find more videos on creativecoe.com too.