Adobe Premier

Adobe Premiere

Premiere ($595)

Adobe Systems

1585 Charleston Road

Mountain View, California 94039

With the advent of QuickTime, Apple's digital moviemaking standard, video editing from hard disk has been the focus of increased interest. Premiere from Adobe is one of the first packages designed specifically for QuickTime editing.

Due to the hardware and software limits of the basic Macintosh, QuickTime movies are restricted to a relatively small area of the screen. Resolution and frame rate are also inferior to video; thus, QuickTime currently lacks the necessary quality for online video editing. The resulting movies are great fun for playback on the computer, however.

Premiere uses a timeline analogy to assemble QuickTime clips. Clips are visually represented by a small image, usually the first frame from the corresponding video segment. These thumbnails can be arranged, rearranged and previewed easily.

The timeline contains seven tracks:

three audio, A and B video, special effects and superimpose. A number of transition effects can be placed on the special effects track, allowing A/B-roll style digital effects between the two video tracks. These effects include dissolves, wipes and page turns. Clips can also be visually modified with a variety of very effective special effects filters.

The superimpose track does just what its name implies, allowing graphic elements to be overlayed on video. The audio tracks come complete with rudimentary editing and mixing controls. A visual representation of the audio waveform is displayed.

On all the tracks, the physical size of an event dictates how long it will be seen or heard.

Stretching a transition effect, for example, allows its length to be finetuned to match the two video tracks. In this way, the flow of a QuickTime movie can be easily controlled.