HTV Editing with Adobe Premiere 2.0

For some time, there has been a new kid on the block, namely HDV (High Definition Digital Video) and now, HDV editing. While HDV has been around for about two years, the heavyweight editing products have been a little slower to appear. Many, perhaps the majority, will say why bother with HDV when DV is so good. There are very few places that can show HDV. However as years progress and more people invest in high definition televisions and projectors, the case for HDV may become a sensible direction to follow.

HDV cameras start at under £1,000 while the top of the range models are in the same price league as their DV only equivalents. Most HDV models can shoot NTSC or PAL and have a range of recording formats including DV and DVCAM (standard definition). In standard definition you can choose between16:9 or 4:3. In high definition there is no 4:3 format in other words, you can only shoot widescreen. So now you have bought a new HDV camera, do you shoot HD or SD? If you shoot HD then you could down-convert on the camera and edit in standard definition. The results will be very similar to any other DV edit. The second possibility is to shoot in HDV and edit in HDV and then save in SD to DVD or via the edit suite or camera, down-convert to DV. This should give a superior result to editing the same material in DV. Then the third method is to shoot in HDV, edit in HDV and save either to Blue Ray, HD-DVD (new DVD formats) or HDV tape.

Now I have mentioned the new DVD formats, let me sidetrack just for a moment. The DVD burning hardware is now available in the region of £500; disks cost about £15 and Sonic are at least one major software manufacturer to introduce an HD authoring application. Maybe these prices are a little "top end" for the majority of non-commercial users but just wait a couple of years. Was this not the case with DVDs not so long ago?

Shooting HDV is made possible by using a form of MPEG2 compression to squeeze as much picture information into the limited bandwidth available using the DV format. The video is compressed by not only using Intraframe (within the frame) as well as Temporal (over several frames) compression. The first and least complex frames go by the name of "I" frames (intra). These are complete picture files. The other frames in the group are "P" (predicted) frames and "B" (bi-directional predicted). The "B" and "P" frames just contain motion information comparing it to adjacent frames. The complete group between the "I" frames is known as a GOP (group of pictures). If we were to only edit between "I" frames (about every 0.5 second), life would be a lot easier. However mostly we will want to edit to the frame i.e. within the GOP structure. To accomplish this, a new timeline GOP has to be created as frames within the original GOP are dependent on the surrounding frames.

Adobe Premiere has been around for quite a number of years. I guess you either like it or not. Certainly many of us like it. In many ways Adobe's introduction in January 2006 of their new version of Premiere Pro, 2.0, was somewhat overdue. Their previous version, Premiere Pro1.5 could be updated to work in HDV. However it uncompressed the video to a motion-JPEG codec which meant that you needed fast drives and about four times the amount of storage. Premiere Pro 2.0 edits in a "Native" format which means that the quality should be maintained without the need to re-encode and the amount of storage required and bit rate are the same as for DV.

So having decided to upgrade to editing in HDV with a PC and use Adobe's software, how much is it going to cost? There are a number of options. The software is bundled together in two packages known as Adobe Creative Suite Production Studios. The standard package comes with After Effects 7.0 standard, Premiere Pro 2.0, Photoshop CS2, Bridge and Dynamic Link while the premium one includes the above but the After Effects is the professional version and also included are Encore DVD 2.0, Audition 2.0 and Illustrator CS2. The standard package costs around £820 with the premium version tipping the scales at a fraction over £1000. Not too much cheaper is the stand alone version of Premiere Pro 2.0 which costs £746, with updates from previous versions available from £198. However if you do not have a previous version from which to upgrade, the package prices start to look very attractive. For
individual and up to date prices, check the Adobe website. There is no longer any use in looking for cheaper imports from other countries. Adobe has set a unified price. No matter where you buy it, it should be the same price. Before leaving the subject of price, I should mention the new Matrox RT. X2 board which includes a copy of Premiere Pro 2.0. This comes in at about £1,200. This sounds a lot but when you take away the £748 for the Premiere Pro it is possibly not so bad.

So let's start to take a look at the Adobe new editing products. As with the majority of Adobe software it comes with comprehensive books. Although I am all for saving paper but balancing a laptop running an application’s help files alongside an edit computer is far from being the easiest way to learn how to use a new program. If books are not your thing and you want to get going ASAP, there are also 2 training DVDs included. These are very good and should get any newcomer editing in about an hour or two - but be warned, they move pretty fast.

Last year, Adobe introduced Premiere Elements 2. This contained an auto resize tool. If you want to zoom into one panel all the other panels resize automatically. This feature is now not only on Premiere but also on After Effects, Audition and Encore. This is extremely useful when you want to zoom in, for instance, to one of the bins or use more tracks on the timeline. Unlike previous versions the whole of the workspace can be customized and saved. You can now dock any panel with any other panel.

Then we have something called Dynamic Link. As the name would suggest, it
links the various applications together. Say you had prepared a little animation in After Effects and when you drop it into the timeline in Premiere and play it, you decide the background colour is wrong. With dynamic link you just go back to After Effects and do what you want there and any changes you make will appear immediately on the Premiere timeline. One obvious advantage is that it saves a lot of rendering time. However it does come at a cost. Having two programs and Dynamic Link running at the same time will further sap the computer's resources which could cause problems on all but cutting edge machines.

Premiere 2.0 now has a multi-camera mode. At the moment this is limited to four cameras. Video media with their associated audio can be dropped on to the timeline and synchronised. This can be by either using a key frame, such as a clapper board or by using the similar (time of day) timecode. Then all you have to do is to run the sequence and then select the appropriate camera by pushing the numbers 1 to 4. Wearing my professional hat, this would be very useful editing multi-camera shoots such as concerts or sports events. Whether the non-professional would find it so useful is somewhat debatable.

The Colour Correction has been completely redesigned and comes in two sections. The fast Colour Corrector is for relatively simple changes and provides real time previews. The second corrector is very much more comprehensive and boasts of a three way colour corrector, one for highlights, one for mid-tones and one for shadows. In theory you should be able to select a blue car and make it red.

Moving to sound and the situation is similar. Say you decided to use Adobe Audition 2.0 to modify a sound track then you can go there directly from the timeline and once you have finished, Premiere 2.0 puts the modified sound track back on the timeline from where it came. It also saves the old one in a bin just in case you change your mind.

Lastly, Premiere Pro 2.0 allows you to produce DVDs direct from the timeline. A small range of templates are included. When I reviewed DVD Authoring packages last year, I suggested Adobe was a bit mean not to include any goodies in the way of sound loops, menus etc. Maybe they were listening, as Encore 2.0 and Premiere Pro 2.0 both come with a good selection. This new version of Encore is a lot easier to use. I certainly prefer it to the earlier ones.

Whatever direction you go, you will need a cutting edge computer. Dual core or dual processors are a must. My choice was a dual core AMD64 - basically the faster the better. Another item to check is the graphics card. As some of the image processing is done on the card, you will need "Open GL" compatibility. For storage I use a three-drive SATA Raid configured as Raid "0" giving me 750 gigabytes of storage. Lastly do not overlook the power supply. I would recommend a 500 watt version. In all with a Windows 64bit version of XP and careful shopping, it cost about £700 to build.

Now we have the decision whether to use Premiere Pro 2.0 by itself or use it with
a graphics accelerator board. Both combinations need the same cutting edge computer. The most obvious choice is the Matrox RT.X2 board. If you do decide to buy one, I would suggest you buy the RT.X2 first and build the computer around it. The board is very large. I chose a fairly large case but even this case is not really big enough to position the board without re-positioning my hard drive array. The immediate advantages of including a Matrox board are the analogue in and out. However when working in HDV, would the average user need to use analogue? Maybe not. The RT.X2 does have a DVI output which can be connected to any DVI computer monitor to give a High Definition output. OK, there will be some pixel re-mapping but this occurs on all consumer televisions anyhow.

I guess the real plus using the Matrox RT.X2 card is the "real time" element and the lack of having to render the majority of effects. Using Premier 2.0 by itself, I find the render time for a 10 minute movie about 12 minutes. This time will very much depend on the complexity of the edit and the number of effects etc. I can just about run two layers of HDV on my timeline. It can be a little bit jerky but certainly good enough to edit. With the RT.X2 installed all the instability goes. It can just about cope with three layers of HDV should you ever wish to do multiple picture in picture. Then, of course the ability to record immediately to tape can't be bad news.

All in all, this is a fantastic package and it is difficult to think what could be added to Premiere version 3. It goes by the name of Pro, presumably to aim itself at the professional market brought up on Avids. How many of these new features will be useful to the serious amateur / non-commercial film maker will depend on the individual user but whatever the case, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 is a great application.