Adobe "Premieres" Pro: with support from Matrox and Canopus, Adobe optimizes its flagship DV editing system.(DV)

According to Adobe, the newest version of its flagship video editing product, Premiere, represents the most significant upgrade to the program since its initial introduction in 1991--so significant that the company has abandoned its existing naming conventions. Instead of calling it Adobe Premiere 7.0, the company has christened it Adobe Premiere Pro.

Richard Townhill, group product manager for Premiere Pro, says the new nomenclature is war ranted by the fact that the product has been built on an entirely new code base that's been rewritten from the ground up. Adobe has been working on this new version for two and a half years, Townhill says, and during that time "we have been accumulating tons of feedback from existing Premiere users as well as non-Premiere users, and we've used that to guide the features of this new product."

The result, says Townhill, is a far more professional version of Premiere, one that incorporates a long list of new capabilities while eliminating a lot of little annoyances that Townhill admits used to drive professional video editors crazy. "In short," he says, "this is not your father's Premiere."

It seems clear that Adobe has pulled no punches in its quest to build a more serious, more professional program that promises to command a new degree of respect from video pros everywhere. This can be seen in the company's decision to abandon its traditional but dated A/B editing model in favor of a single-track approach. Further evidence is the program's ability to handle HD footage and its support for AAF (Advanced Authoring Format), which enables editors to export files to other programs for finishing work. These changes have won praise from reviewers who've been able to work with beta copies of the program.

"The work flow has been economized to enable you to perform as many things as possible with only a few clicks or a few keystrokes," says Townhill. "We have added powerful editing tools like multiple nested timelines; real-time editing, including transmitting out of the 1394 port in software; three-point color correction; a full set of scopes; sample-level audio editing; and surround-sound mixing including Dolby Digital encoding. The list is extensive."

One of the most surprising developments is Adobe's decision to drop its support for the Macintosh, making Adobe Premiere Pro available only for the Windows XP operating system. In announcing that decision, Adobe has made much of the fact that Premiere Pro takes advantage of the Hyper-Threading (HT) technology pioneered in Intel's latest Pentium 4 processor-based systems, while also exploiting advances in Microsoft's Windows Media 9 series--such as high-definition video and 7.1 channel surround-sound streaming audio.

"We have gone to great lengths to optimize for speed, taking full advantage of the processor and operating system," Townhill says. The goal of the program, Adobe maintains, is to provide a render-free editing experience.