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Sequences can be used as building blocks for your project, which is especially useful for boilerplate items that are used frequently.
The project window now contains much more data than before, even to the point where it can be used in place of the old Storyboard feature.
A variety of output options are available to the Monitor pane, including vector and waveform scopes for colour and luminosity calibration.

Adobe has been busy lately, and the release of Premiere Pro is merely part of a collection of freshly-milled products that includes After Effects, Audition, Encore and Photoshop. With Premiere Pro (essentially the Premiere 7.0 that we’ve been waiting for), Adobe is hoping to lift this enduring non-linear editor (NLE) out of the mainstream/consumer sector and gather more interest from the professional/studio market.
Rather shockingly, Premiere Pro is a WinXP/PC-only release, leading to the conclusion that Adobe, a long-standing name in the Mac sector, has abandoned this side of the market to Apple’s own Final Cut Pro – which is now accepted as the Mac NLE of choice – or that it has something else in the wings. Either way, this is unlikely to affect PC users, who will be more than interested in Premiere Pro’s new features.

The New Interface

First up, and most obvious, is a fairly comprehensive alteration to the interface. It’s not so radically different that existing Premiere users will feel lost and confused, but the furniture has definitely been shifted around a bit.

The project window, where all your assets and bins are kept, now provides a long list of extra information including in/out points, offline/online status, number of times that it’s used in project, as well as a colour label for those who can’t read file extensions. Interestingly, the storyboard feature has been replaced entirely by the project window’s thumbnail view. Instead of using a dedicated storyboard window, you just rearrange the thumbnails in the project window and then ‘automate to timeline’ as before. As a result, things can be a little cramped in the default space for this window, so a multi-display setup would be rather handy here, giving you a little more room to stretch out in.

Also in the project window, you’ll find a tab – a common theme throughout the UI – that lets you swap to the effects view, which used to have a window to itself. I’m all for getting the most of your available screen space, but got a little irritated by the need to switch back and forth between project and effects tabs when building a sequence. Until, of course, I found out that if you don’t like the tab arrangement, you can just tear it off and drop it somewhere else. Very nice.

The tool palette has also been stripped back to basics, replacing the rather esoteric pull-out options with the basic toolset (selection, track select, ripple, roll, stretch, razor, slip, slide, pen, grab and zoom). To get to tool variants like multi-track select or lift, you use keystroke commands like ALT, CTRL or Shift. It takes a while to learn these keyboard shortcuts (which are again customisable), but it soon becomes second nature.

While it looks familiar and maintains all of its previous functions, the timeline has also been tweaked. You can set the ruler to audio units, which use audio sample rates rather than frame counts for greater accuracy when cutting to music, for example, or you can set a sequence zero point to allow for material that occurs before the video starts, like a counting leader. The zoom slider has been duplicated across the head of the timeline, allowing you to quickly adjust the amount of detail within the timeline, and red/green indicators show which areas of your project need rendering, and which have already been rendered. Tracks can be dragged to increase their height, with the conventional toggle for viewing audio waveforms or transparency values.

Other changes can be found in the source/preview monitor. The transport controls are obviously still intact, as are the preview panes themselves, but the effect controls pane is now on a tab behind the source pane (again, this can be torn off and dropped elsewhere), and new output options including colour scopes and transparency views are selectable from a drop-down list. The zoom slider also makes an appearance here, as does the option to toggle between dual and single pane views.