Specifications

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A Digital Video Primer
Looking for approval?
With Adobe Premiere Pro, you can assemble a storyboard or rough cut in minutes. Using
the Icon view in the Project panel, you can quickly assemble stills, such as photos or concept
sketches, into a storyboard-style slide show or, if you have clips, into a rough cut. Just drag and
drop poster-frame icons, arranging and rearranging them until you, your colleagues, and your
clients are completely satised. en use the Automate To Sequence command to instantly send
your sequenced material to the Timeline, where it will be automatically assembled using a default
transition you specify. Add music and voiceover for a smooth presentation you can use to share
your concepts.
Aer Eects is also a wonderful visualization tool that can be used to help you share and sell
your concepts. Read more about Aer Eects in the next section.
Putting the pieces together
Enough of your assets have been captured, coordinated, corrected, and created for you to begin
putting your production together. With capable and cost-eective NLE programs, like Adobe
Premiere Pro, you can work just as you would on any high-end proprietary system, with precise
trimming tools and support for three-, four-, ve-, six-, and seven-point edits. Adobe Premiere
Pro also facilitates the slip and slide, ripple, and rolling edits described in this section, and lets
you work with industry-standard keyboard shortcuts.
For piecing together your production, you’ll typically work back and forth between the three main
panels in your workspace: the Project panel, the Timeline panels, and the Monitors.
e timeline graphically shows the placement of each clip in time, its duration, and its relation-
ship to the other clips in the program. Once you’ve captured or imported clips into your project,
you can use the Timeline panel to organize your clips sequentially; make changes to a clip’s duration,
speed, and location; add transitions; superimpose clips; and apply eects, opacity, and motion.
e Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline panel is easy to use, understand, and manage; audio, video,
and graphics clips can be moved, trimmed, and adjusted with simple mouse clicks or with keyboard
commands. Up to 99 video and 99 audio tracks can be created for your program, and each track
can be given a descriptive ID. Tracks can be hidden to reduce screen clutter or locked to avoid
accidental changes. Each track in Adobe Premiere Pro is collapsible, so you can free up screen
space. You can expand tracks to make precise adjustments to transitions between video clips. e
preview indicator area (directly under the time ruler) is color-enhanced: green means that a
preview exists on disk for the segment; red indicates that the segment needs to be prerendered
before it can be previewed; and no color indicates a cuts-only segment that can play in real time.
In Adobe Premiere Pro, you can set up a virtually unlimited number of timelines and nest any
number of timelines inside others with complete exibility. e ability to create and nest mul-
tiple timelines streamlines a range of editing tasks. You could, for example, divide a complicated
video project into parts with each part assembled on a separate timeline, and then combine
those parts together by nesting the timelines into one main timeline. You could also set up one
timeline and then duplicate it several times to try out dierent cuts or visual eects for a client or
director without aecting the original version. Quickly comparing the original against several
variations can speed up editing decisions and client approval time signicantly. In addition,
you can use separate timelines to manage how eects are applied. For example, you could apply
dierent eects to several timelines, and then nest the timelines to apply an eect, such as a color
correction, to all of them.
You can use the Source Monitor to view a wide range of media including individual clips, still
images, audio, color mattes, and titles. Resizing the monitor dynamically resizes the video image
displayed in each view. To help you position on-screen elements, you can switch on safe zone
guides. A magnication setting lets you examine the image in detail or zoom out when you need
to see the o-screen pasteboard area. In addition, you can manually reset display quality, which
can reduce rendering times.
THANK YOU MAM!
As the world’s gone digital, the facts, photos, and
footage we used to archive and catalog in le cabi-
nets and on library shelves has found its way into our
computers. What an incredible opportunity! Digital
media assets can and should be searchable, acces-
sible, and easily exchangeable across workgroups and
even around the world, via intranets and the Internet.
A whole industry has emerged, focused on Media
Asset Management (MAM), also known as Digital
Asset Management (DAM).
One of the major challenges in the development of
media asset management solutions was how to make
the content (the images, animations, video, and audio
clips that have been created and stored in a host of
dierent formats) and its associated metadata (ancil-
lary data that describes and species content, such as
source location, timecode, transitions, descriptive key
words, and so on) exchangeable across dierent com-
puting platforms and between various multimedia
and post-production applications. An open standard
was needed; one that would be accepted by the many
video-related industries.
The answer began to emerge with OMF (or OMFI),
the Open Media Framework Interchange format,
a media and metadata exchange solution introduced
by Avid. OMF adoption has been slow, but as the
industry transitions to the more widely accepted
AAF standard, more applications and utilities are also
including support for the OMF interchange.
AAF, the Advanced Authoring Format, has emerged
as the open standard of choice. Sometimes described
as a super EDL solution, AAF is, essentially, a wrapper
technology that can include the content itself or links
(pointers) to it, along with relevant metadata.
Although AAF les may contain the actual content,
the emphasis of this format is the exchange of com-
position metadata, in other words, the information
that describes how content is handled in a composi-
tion, rather than on the exchange of the content itself.
In addition to AAF, a related standard is now also com-
ing into broader use, MXF, the Material eXchange
Format. Like AAF, MXF is an open standard for the
exchange of content and its associated metadata
across platforms and between applications. MXF was
designed for less complex metadata applications
than AAF. Where AAF may include the actual content
or only a link to it, MXF always includes the content
along with the metadata. The primary objective of
MXF is the streamlined exchange of content and
associated metadata. MXF les may be used as a
source for AAF. With its greater emphasis on actual
content exchange, MXF is better optimized than AAF
for real-time streaming of video and audio assets,
making it an excellent solution for such applications
as broadcast news editing.