Others say...

"Bulletproof and feature rich, but not a DVD authoring tool"
I'm an advanced amateur, I guess. I really like taking video and playing around with my camera. Much of my video is taken from the inside of my car when I go racing. I have tons of footage, and I like to spend the winter distilling things down into videos for myself, my friends, and family. Plus, my website, too.

When I got started with this idea, I was trying to use Pinnacle Studio 8. It was a horrible experience: the software crashed every time I felt I was about to make progress. It was slow, and Pinnacle's support was pretty marginal. I simply wasn't having fun.

After asking around, I found that almost anyone whose opinion I respected recommended the Adobe products. They're rather expensive, but I saved up and bought them. And I can't believe I waited so long!

First, I want to clarify that Adobe Premiere is not a full-featured DVD burning tool. You can get pretty far with it, but it's important to know what it does and what it doesn't do.

You can use Premiere to capture video from your camcorder, or your favorite frame-grabber hardware. The product includes a really neat batch-capture feature which lets you specify a bunch of different time ranges on your tape. You start batch capture and walk away: if Premiere can control your camera (and it probably can, if it has a FireWire port) it will suck down the ranges you ask for and take care of cuing.

You can also use Premiere to edit whatever video you have lying around; from the web, and so on.

The product will help let you introduce video and audio effects and transitions between your clips. You can do non-linear editing, which means that you can drag-and-drop clips wherever you'd like them to be.

There are plenty of technical features, including advanced color correction and balance features. Cleaning up marginal tape is pretty easy! You can also resize and move video. I'm really excited about using the product to produce split-screen views from the race car: a faster lap on the left, and a slower lap on the right, so I can learn where I'm making mistakes. I got this working in just a few minutes!

There are a few dozen interesting transitions, from modest cross-fades to more advanced wipes and dissolves. You can apply audio transitions, as well. Doing edits where the sound transitions before or after the video is trivial -- something that's a bit of a challenge in other products.

You can edit titles and insert them as video. It's easy to move PhotoShop files (including their layers!) into the video stream. And you can filter, edit, and adjust the audio tracks on your videos as you produce them, too.

Premiere will burn to DVD when you're done, or you can export to a myriad of formats appropriate for burning digital media to disk (to share with others) or publishing on the web.

You can have as many audio tracks as you like, and both 16:9 formats and 5.1 sound are supported.
Premiere makes asset management pretty easy, at least over the few hundred files that I have floating around.

Premiere doesn't do a few things that Studio 8 did do: most notably, it doesn't have any features for making DVD menus, play rules, or burning a a "real" DVD. Premiere alone can dump your video stream to A DVD so you can take it to your home theater, but you won't have menus, angles, multiple audio features, and so on. You'll need to buy additional products for these other features.

I was a bit intimidated by the product at first. Initially, I thought it didn't do much work for me. But it took a while to learn the nomenclature -- all proper terms used by professional video folks, instead of the "slang" that simpler products use. But now that I understand what to call my different edits or controls, I'm much more at home and more comfortable with the product.

If you're having stability or functionality problems with lesser products, I know that Premiere will solve your problems ... once you get over the higher price. I wish there was a dumbed-down product for the advanced hobbyist, like me. But I'm having so much fun with video now that I don't feel bad about shelling out the extra money. And I'm certainly happy that I didn't upgrade the other products that I own; I probably would've been disappointed, and certainly just put off the satisfaction I realized when I finally became productive with Premiere.


"Best NLE for PC platform"
Version 1.5 of Premiere Pro is much more stable than previous verions. Its menus are intuitive and its features extensive. Particularly strong are the ability to move back and forth with Audition (for sound editing), encore (for DVD creation), After Effects (for adding special effects and animations), and Photoshop (for static picture editing). It is missing some features found in Final Cut Pro (like being able to assign multiply, screen, overlay, lighten, etc. modes to clips), but if the video collection is purchased, there are easy workarounds using other software in the collection (like after effects). Unlike Avid Xpress Pro, it is PC only, so those who plan to share files with MAC editors or who plan to upscale to a high end Avid system - might look at Xpress Pro instead.

Its 24P support is more flawed than either Vegas or Xpress Pro. Hopefully this will be fixed with a patch in the near future.

"To bad for Mac users Pro 1.5 is simply wonderful."
If you are using 6.5 or below, why? Now is the time to upgrade!*

I love the new Pro interface and with Win XP's effortless multiple monitor support I'm in heaven. The features added in Pro 1.5 make it a worthwhile upgrade: project management tools, Panasonic 24P/24PA support, Bézier keyframe controls, effects favorites (AWESOME), HiDef (HDTV) support, auto-color adjustment (Pro 1.0 has some great color support too, but it's a no brainer now), project-ready Photoshop files (great for a WYSIWYG in Photoshop 7.0 and above - helps greatly with pixel aspect ratio issues), After Effects plug-in compatibility, After Effects clipboard support (have not used this yet, Discreet Combustion user :) ), AAF (Advanced Authoring Format, for some compatibility with AVID), Windows Media 9 export from the timeline (supports HDTV-720P-1080i) - WM9(VC-9) is part of the new HD-DVD spec coming soon to an outlet near you. You can also configure your keyboard hotkeys quickly to comform to Final Cut Pro 4.0 or AVID Xpress DV 3.5.

* WARNING - You must have SSE chip support and Windows XP. For AMD users this means you must have a Athlon XP or 'higher' chip.

If you are not upgrading but buying new get the Adobe Video Collection Standard it is only $200 more and is WORTH IT. If you are upgrading don't upgrade to AVC just upgrade to Pro 1.5. Buy a new AVC so you can have 2 licenses of Premiere Pro dirt cheap.