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Preparing for this review, I went back in my files to find my first review of Adobe Premiere. Filed almost a decade ago, it covered Premiere 2.0 with a Radius VideoVision NuBus board. For those who don't remember the VideoVision, it was a state-of-the-art A/V board for the Mac. Here's how I described it:
"VideoVision supports 8-bit and 24-bit RGB color monitors. Two channels of audio can be digitized with 8-bit resolution at either an 11kHz or 22kHz sampling rate. When you select Premiere's Movie Capture command you should specify 160120 pixels and compression using the Apple Video codec with "high" quality at 10fps. With these settings, I could record 30 seconds of video to my Mac IIci's 20MB of RAM. By not checking "Record to RAM," I could record at 7fps directly to hard disk."
I then added this optimistic paragraph to my review: "By the time you read this, a JPEG daughter-board will be available that will perform video I/O up to 30fps at 320240 pixels."
During the decade following my review, Adobe has added features such as the dual-monitor window and a much-improved setup interface. However, until version 6, much of Adobe's effort had been expended eliminating bugs - in particular problems keeping audio and video in synch. With 6.5, Adobe continues its incremental product enhancement with an enhanced titler, expanded export options, and realtime previews.
The new titler is fantastic. You can create titles precisely with typographical controls such as leading, kerning, baseline shift, rotation, and slant. Premiere now offers the Adobe-standard Pen tool to draw free-form vector shapes that range from simple to complex forms. Or use the additional drawing tools to create common shapes such as circles and polygons.
Adobe has included hundreds of predefined text and object styles. Of course, you can create your own custom styles. Also included are more than 100 professional templates that you can use for still layouts, rolls, and crawls. Adobe bundled more than 90 Adobe fonts that, the company claims, have a value of...