The Read Me contains notes about the changes and updated features in Adobe Premiere 4.2, and information about known problems with QuickTime and other software.
New installed software
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• QuickTime 2.1
Adobe Premiere 4.2 now includes Apple's QuickTime 2.1. This update fixes many problems related to system stability and memory management. We strongly recommend that all users of Premiere and QuickTime install this new version of Apple’s QuickTime system software.
• Sound Manager 3.1
Adobe Premiere 4.2 now installs Apple's Sound Manager 3.1. This update of the Sound Manager now includes native PowerPC support, and will greatly enhance performance on PowerPC systems.
• Adobe Type Manager ATM 3.8.3
New Features & Improvements
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• Premiere now includes a CD-ROM Movie Maker for creating QuickTime movies for multimedia projects. See the Premiere 4.2 Getting Started guide for more information.
• The zero point of the ruler in the Construction Window timeline can now be set in the Construction Window options. This is handy for coordinating Premiere projects with existing tape footage.
• Movies made with Premiere now include a Timecode track that will use the Construction Window's ruler zero point as the base time code for the movie being made. If you are using a device that can output time code while playing back a movie, such as a Radius Telecast, then the QuickTime movie's timecode will be sent to that device and can be used to synchronize external devices.
• The Transition Window now has a setup dialog that can be reached via the Window->Transition Window Options menu item when the Transition window is frontmost. This dialog lets the user decide which transitions will be visible in the Transition window, save and load sets of transitions, and choose whether descriptions will be shown in the window or just the names of the transitions and a small icon.
• When opening a project, Premiere now displays a progress bar while the project is loading. If you wish to cancel opening a project, you can press Command-period while the progress bar is being displayed.
• Mark In and Mark Out commands have been added to the Clip Menu and the Commands palette. These commands set the In and Out points of clips in clip windows, or of the Work Area in the Construction Window when using the Controller window.
• The Batch Capture window now allows horizontal resizing. This is useful when there are long comments attached to clips to be captured.
• The Batch Capture window now allows items to be dragged and dropped to or from other batch lists.
• The trimming shortcuts used in the Construction Window ( , . ; ' [ ] - see the Quick Reference card for more information) will now display side by side views of the clips being trimmed if Edge Viewing is active. (You can turn on Edge Viewing from the Construction Window Options dialog, or by pressing ' ` ' [tilde]).
• If Edge Viewing is active, edits viewed by choosing the next/previous edit buttons in the construction window or by pressing PageUp/Dn from the keyboard will now be viewed as side by side views in the Preview Window.
• The Movie Capture window and clip logging dialogs now remember and default to the reel name last entered.
• Premiere now defaults to the 'Heads and Tails' view for clips in the Construction Window. This option can greatly speed up displays in the Construction Window. If you wish to see all the thumbnails in a project, you can choose the 'Thumbnails' view in the Construction Window options dialog under the Windows menu when the Construction Window is active.
• Premiere now defaults to a smaller thumbnail size for clips in the Construction Window. This reduces much of the screen clutter when editing with Premiere. If you wish to see larger clip thumbnails in a project, you can choose a larger clip size in the Construction Window Options dialog under the Windows menu when the Construction Window is active.
• The ‘Goodies’ folder now contains two new audio filters, Take Left and Take Right. These filters take the given stereo audio channel and copy it to the opposite channel. The difference between these filters and the existing Fill Left and Fill Right filters is that the ‘Fill’ filters strip out the opposite channel, leaving the audio information pinned to a given channel, where the ‘Take’ filters fill both channels with the given audio data, centering it in the stereo field.
• The Transparency Settings dialog now remembers the last state of the background sample color and pattern, and collapse settings.
• Rate Stretch tool - this new Construction Window tool allows you to drag any clip's end to lengthen the clip, thus changing the speed of the clip to accommodate the new duration.
• Audio Dissolve tool - this new Construction Window tool allows you to click an audio clip and then click another audio clip that overlaps it. This creates an automatic audio cross dissolve between the two clips.
• Speed Pop-up - You can access a new pop-up menu by holding down Control-Option-Command and clicking on any clip in the construction window or any clip window. This pops up a list of most of the commands in the Edit and Clip menus that are enabled for the item on which you've clicked.
• You can now stop movie captures from the keyboard by pressing Command-Period.
• There is a new command in the Waveform monitor named 'Overlay Test Pattern'. This command causes the current test pattern to show across a horizontal section of the video display area, leaving the incoming video running at the top and bottom. This allows easy comparison of an incoming video signal to any of the test patterns or to the clip on the clipboard.
• Downsample filter - This audio filter provides fairly clean conversion from one audio sample rate to a lower sample rate. You can use this filter, for example, when converting from a 44 KHz 16-bit stereo CD audio track to an 11 KHz 8-bit mono audio track This filter improves the quality of the audio conversion by first applying an appropriate low pass filter to the audio clip.
• Pan - This audio filter allows audio to be panned from left to right, similar to the balance control on an amplifier. Use the slider to pan the audio clip left or right. You may press the spacebar to quickly center the slider. EDLs generated from projects that use the Pan filter will contain a comment describing the pan that was applied to the audio.
• Swap Left & Right - This audio filter exchanges the left and right audio channels of a clip.
• The Motion dialog box now has more options: several new smoothing options, and a visual motion path option. See the Getting Started guide for more information. The Motion Settings dialog also now remembers the last state of the play button, Show All, Show Path, Show Frames, and collapse options.
• If you hold down the option key over the Transition track in the Construction Window where two clips in the A and B tracks overlap, you will see a transition cursor appear. Click once, and a transition will be inserted at that point in the timeline. The transition inserted is a Cross Dissolve by default, but will change to the last transition dragged from the Transitions window.
• The ‘Half horizontal’ and ‘Half vertical’ options in the Preview and Output options dialogs have been removed.
• The Output Options dialog now has a checkbox named ‘Make Flattened’. If this option is selected, Premiere will created QuickTime movies optimized for cross-platform playback.
• The Output Options dialog now has a checkbox labeled ‘Optimize stills’ that defaults to off. When earlier versions of Premiere compiled a movie, if a still image in the timeline that required no changes when placed into a movie, Premiere would simply render one frame of that still image and place it in the final movie with an appropriate duration. This operation would save a significent amount of disk space and processing time. Unfortunately, some JPEG playback boards will balk when trying to play movies with frames that have long durations, so Premiere now defaults to not performing this optimization on still images. If you wish to turn the still option back on for multimedia productions, you may do so by selecting the ‘Optimize stills’ checkbox.
•The Titler now includes a new ‘Emboss’ style.
• Pressing the space bar from the Construction Window now toggles play/stop in the controller.
• Offline files - Premiere now allows files to be placed offline when they are not available, or to be created as offline material. For more information on offline files, see the Premiere 4.2 Getting Started guide.
• The Frame Hold dialog now allows temporal sampling and frame blending for smoother slow motion.
• The Field Options dialog now has a Flicker Removal option. This option does a vertical convolution on an image so that it will not flicker when displayed on an interlaced monitor.
• Windows will now ‘snap’ to the edges of each other, to the menu bar, and to the edge of a monitor, making it easier for you to organize the screen.
• There is now an optional plug-in that supports Abekas digital disk recorders within Premiere. This plug-in is located in the Third Parties folder, and contains a Read Me file with more information on the use of Premiere with an Abekas DDR.
• The work area in the Construction Window now wraps around if the in and out points overlap.
• The Movie Capture window now displays the current scratch disk in the caption of its window (e.g. "Movie Capture : Array 1"). This helpful for checking that you are capturing to a given hard disk before you press the Record button.
Making Referencing Movies
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• There is now an optional plug-in that installs an alternate movie compiler into Premiere 4.2, the Referencing Movie compiler that will compile referencing QuickTime movies. For more information, look in the Premiere Goodies folder inside the Addition Plug-ins folder, and read the Read Me file located there.
Speed Enhancements
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• When more than 100 clips were in a project, many editing operations, such as moving a clip in the Construction Window, could react very slowly, sometimes to a point where the program would appear to hang for several minutes. Most of these operations have now been optimized, and should respond much more quickly.
• Opening clip folders in a project containing more than 100 clips could take up to several minutes to open. These folders now open almost instantly.
• In most cases, Projects, Sequences, and Libraries now open about twice as fast as before.
New Shortcuts
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• Double-clicking in any blank area in the Project, Library, or Sequence windows now brings up the Import dialog. Double-clicking in any blank area while holding down control, option, or command, or triple-clicking, now brings up the Import Multiple dialog.
• Command-spacebar has always played the current clip in a clip window from the In to the Out points. Command-Shift-spacebar now plays from the current frame to the clip's out point.
• Holding down the Option key while choosing any of the Insert in Construction Window commands will now ask for an alias name for the clip being inserted.
Bug Fixes
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The following bugs or problems in Adobe Premiere 4.0.1 have been fixed:
• As of this writing, all movies captured using any version of QuickTime will have one long frame at the beginning of a movie of up to 199% of the duration of a normal frame. This long frame was not eliminated when movies were conformed, and could cause clips captured with timecode to be inaccurate, EDLs to be generated improperly, and duplicated frames to be seen in projects. Premiere 4.2 now truncates the first frame of video at capture time to be the duration of a normal frame, and truncates the start of the audio track accordingly to maintain audio sync. This change fixes many problems with timecode and EDLs, and makes captured movies and timecode generally much more accurate.
• The Conform Movie tool and Conform movie setting in the Movie Capture options was improperly conforming movies when the captured movie rate did not match the requested movie rate. This could cause captured clips to be sped up by a factor of two or more in some instances. Premiere 4.2 now quantizes the frame durations to match the captured frame durations, and will not speed up or change the overall characteristics of a movie except in extreme instances of frame dropping or timing mismatch.
• Video clips with timecode that contained speed changes would display the current timecode for a clip scaled to the speed of that clip when movies were displayed in a clip window; this would cause incorrect display of a given frame's timecode. Premiere 4.2 now properly scales the displayed frame's timecode to match the original timecode of a clip. If you wish to see the actual frame number of a clip that has timecode associated with it, select the 'Zero Based' option in the Clip Window Options dialog under the Windows menu.
• Page Turn, Page Peel, Center Peel, and Peel Away transitions now work properly with field processing enabled.
• Chroma key masks generated black and white masks in Premiere 4.0.1, regardless of the blend setting. Chroma Key now generates grayscale masks.
• Attempting to open or import a QuickTime movie that used a component that was unavailable, such as a component that required hardware that wasn't currently installed, would generate the message "Error Opening that file. The file is damaged or in use by another application." Premiere will now give a message stating that the file requires a QuickTime component that is not currently available.
• The Project Trimmer now removes unused items from trimmed projects. This fixes many obscure problems associated with the Project Trimmer.
• The Project Trimmer did not save untitled projects before trimming. Premiere will now ask you to save a project before you can trim that project.
• Movies captured with Premiere 4.0.1 and QuickTime 2.0 would unreliably add a timecode track that contained incorrect information. Premiere 4.2 now always adds a correct QuickTime timecode track to a movie when it is captured and when it is compiled or copied.
• The Project and Construction windows would print incorrectly, and would either truncate or not print most of the selected pages.
• The ‘Abort on dropped frames’ preference in the Movie Capture window could cause crashes on some Power Macintoshes immediately after capturing.
• The ‘Abort on dropped frames’ preference in the Movie Capture window did not report dropped frames during the first two seconds of a movie capture.
• Trying to add timecode to a clip on a write-protected disk would hang the program.
• Attempting to add a virtual clip past the one hour mark could cause a hang.
• Premiere would attempt to open or import any series of files that began with a still image and contained a numbered sequence of files as a single file, regardless of the file types of the numbered files; this could cause strange behavior including crashes. Premiere now looks at the file’s type to see if the file is of the same type and fits within a sequence before adding it to a numbered image sequence.
• The Movie Capture window in Premiere always defaulted to 4:3 aspect, even when a given capture board had some other aspect. Premiere now defaults to the aspect of a given capture device, and the ‘4:3’ control in the Movie Capture Options dialog has been renamed as ‘Constrain’, and will constrain the capture aspect to a given capture device’s aspect.
• Some Sound Designer II files were not being read correctly, and opening them could crash the program.
• Doing a marquee selection and move of many clips in the Construction Window could cause random crashes in Premiere 4.0.1
• Opening an audio clip window who's clip speed was less than 100% would crash or cause memory corruption.
• Offline files were not working properly in Premiere 4.0.1 and could cause crashes and corrupted projects, even in projects that did not use offline files.
• Clicking on the Commands palette when it was not floating would bring the window to the front, and ignore the button clicked on, which made it necessary to click twice when the window was not floating and the user wished to execute a command. The Commands palette now accepts mouse clicks on items in the command list even when the window is not frontmost.
• Audio processed in virtual clips with the Process At preference active in the audio preferences would result in corrupted audio.
• Movie Analysis incorrectly reported the durations of video tracks in a movie as being up to 1/2 shorter than their actual length.
• Using an alias to an unmounted file server and attempting to import or open would hang the program if you selected that file alias in the file dialog.
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Known QuickTime 2.0/Multimedia Tuner problems
QuickTime 2.0 with the Multimedia Tuner (henceforth QT2MM) had the following problems that were found and fixed during testing by Apple Computer and Adobe Systems:
Playing VideoVision Studio and other hardware-based movies under QT2MM were potentially unstable and could result in random crashes and hangs at unpredictable moments. These crashes were generally much more frequent on Power Macintosh systems, but could occur on 68000-based Macintoshes as well. These instabilities have been substantially fixed with QuickTime 2.1 and the system should be much more stable.
Edits performed in QT2MM that reused the same movie file more than once could result in incorrect frames being displayed in the final movie. This could be seen in Premiere when editing and playing back movies in the Construction Window by video frames that would randomly appear that were not in the correct sequence in time and were obviously from some nearby portion of the project being edited. This problem has been fixed in QuickTime 2.1.
Known QuickTime 2.1 problems
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Because of a conflict between the Radius VideoVision drivers and QuickTime 2.1, QuickTime 2.1 has generally unacceptable performance when playing back fullscreen VideoVision Studio movies even at very modest data rates in Premiere clip windows or Apple's MoviePlayer. For example, a 700k/second, 640x480 VVS clip played on the 640x480 VVS monitor would drop hundreds or thousands of video frames when running under QuickTime 2.1, where this same movie would play fine under QuickTime 2.0.
To alleviate this problem, Premiere now includes a plug-in which is automatically installed in the Premiere plug-ins folder called 'Full screen optimizer' that works around this problem so that QuickTime 2.1 will be able to play back VideoVision movies at acceptable frame rates.
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Adobe, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe Illustrator are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated which may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Macintosh is trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S.A. and other countries. QuickTime is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
