Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0 Media

Author's product rating:   

Instructions / Help	Satisfactory
Ease of use	Easy
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Very powerfull, slick and produces good results
Disadvantages:	quite expensive and initially daunting to use

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I decided to write this review after realising that despite taking hours of digital footage, many people simply either leave it on the tape and buy another tape or even over-write it which sort of spoils the whole idea of capturing those "magic moments" in the first place.

You can get an awfull lot of satisfaction from putting your creation into the DVD player and watching the finished product, better still, giving a copy to a freind or relative and letting them experience the occasion in glorious digital colour!

You will need to have a good DVD burner, a camcorder either digital or analogue but digital is easier, the associated cables, firewire or USB 2.0 is good, USB 1 is too slow and should be avoided for any sort of video editing. The PC should be reasonably powerfull but don't buy a super dooper all singing all dancing one as it will be complete over kill, a 800mhz processor upwards is good enough, memory and hard drive space are most important, make sure you have at least 10 gig of hard drive spare before you start and as much memory as you can, but 256 meg is the absolute minimum I would reccomend if you are running XP

There is a plethora of editing packages available with prices varying from a few pounds up to many hundreds. Adobe premier pro falls into the "hundreds" mark but to be honest, there is always a very good bargain to be had on ebay etc. (mine cost £10)

The reason that this program is set at the higher end of the price range is only apparent after you have used (or tried to use) other titles. Anyone who has edited film footage knows that it can be a time consuming endevour, and then to find that the finished project is not really that great is somewhat discouraging.

Adobe premier pro (or version 7.0 to give it it's alternative title) delivers the goods.

The main thing to look for when deciding on an editing package I think is 1/ ease of use, 2/ having all the tools you need easily available on the screen and 3/ good co-operation between the package and other hardware / software that you have already got. It's no good installing something that will not pick up your DVD burner or worse, your camera etc.

So, you have now installed the program and have it running on the desktop.....what do you do?
Well, the very first thing is to click the "new project" button where by you will find yourself looking at a screen made up of several components...yikes!!
Now, before you go any further, click on the help menu and bring up the index of topics. Read the introduction carefully as this will set you in the right direction. What I tend to do is plug my camera in to the PC and click "file"and "Capture" from the drop down menu. You will find that one of the small screens (there are 2 on show, one for the movie footage as it plays and another for the bit you are editing). becomes the camera controls so you can play / rewind / fast forward etc etc from the screen.

As the movie plays you can stop and start, roughly pick out the good bits as clips, (baby's first steps or interesting shots from the family holiday), leave the boring bits out, (shots of the ceiling, floor wall, lens cap left on etc etc). Each time you save a clip it drops down into the "time line" which basically shows you what you have saved in a series of "blocks" and how long the saved bits are, but more of this later.

When you have been through the film and got all the clips you wan't, then you can watch the series of saved clips as one (as they run back to back in the "time line"). As each saved clip runs, you can stop it, edit it further if you feel the need. You can also take a clip from near the end and drop it in the middle or front of the movie if you want to be very creative.

Now you have the movie in the order you like it with all the boring bits removed, but perhaps you don't like the sudden change of one clip to the next?, well you can soon sort this out by using "video transition effects" which is very easy to use, just click on a particular effect and drag it to where on clip joins the next in the "time line" and the transition will be seamless. there are a lot of different effects to choose from so feel free, it's your movie after all.!!

So the movie runs nicely now, the clips are all seamlessly joined, but what about a title for the masterpiece? well thats easy too, click on the "file" menu, click on "new" and then "title", a new screen comes up which allows you to write a title piece in all sorts of fonts, designs and colours, have it stand still in the middle of the screen of scroll up etc, and as the title is transparent, you can overlay in onto the movie so that the video runs behind it, just like a real movie !

When you save the title it appears as another file which you can then drag down to the time line and place it over where you want it to be seen, maybe over the opening scenes?
At the end you can even create rolling titles to thank all who made the movie possible in the same way.

Now you will want to copy it onto a DVD, well just click the "file" menu and choose "export" and then "export to DVD" then after you have let it start, go for a cuppa as it has to transcode the movie from whatever format it was filmed in to MPEG2 which is the DVD standard, this takes a while, after which it automatically burns to the disk.

When you do it, you will find that there are occasional things here and there which I have left out as I don't want to bore you with technicalities but the foundations are there...enjoy

Well, this little review shows what can be done in it's most basic form but as you grow in confidence, there is a complete hatfull of other things you can try out, and I'm sure that it won't be too many movies down the line before your creations are as good as anything you see on TV.