By Miles Carby
It was evident at this year’s Adobe Workshop that Premier is going to challenge Avid and Final Cut Pro for the position of dominant movie editor.
On Friday, as a part of the Savannah Film Festival, Adobe featured a workshop in which they had two professionals, visual effects artist Jon Carr, and “video evangelist from Adobe,” Sebastian Distefano. Both raved about the benefits of using Adobe software (mainly Premier and AfterEffects).
As a SCAD student, you have the opportunity to download the Adobe CS6 Suite (that’s free!) but still many students haven’t, something Mr. Distefano hopes will change. He, along with Carr, spent the two hours making a strong case through testimonial and demonstrations supporting why students should begin using Adobe.
By using an industry professional, Jon Carr, and someone who helps create the software, Sebastian Distefano, the workshop showed the audience some of the amazing things that filmmakers can do using the Adobe Suite. People who frequent the software already know many of these tools and abilities, but to many students who are novices, what they presented was new and innovative.
Adobe was built in a style that’s interface is between Final Cut Pro and Avid. That makes it a great starting point for someone learning editing software for the first time because if they have to change from Adobe to Avid, enough similarities exist in the interface that the learning curve will be greatly reduced.
So what can Premier and After Effects do exactly?
Specifically, the workshop focused on an ability called Dynamic Link, rendering and the sequencing of software. Using Dynamic Link, the user can use Premier and then actively add special effects from AfterEffects without having to add or export any new sequences. This may sound boring, but for film students used to using Final Cut, this saves a tremendous amount of time. Rendering time, the bane of every filmmaker’s existence, is also reduced. How? Instead of creating new cache files every time you want to change an effect, Premier remembers what Cache files are similar to the ones you need and reuses them. The effect is that students who don’t have 16 GB of RAM are given a better opportunity to compete with more endowed computers.
On a final note, the thought that went into Adobe’s approach to using the software was impressive. They have designed all their products to be used in a specific order. You can brainstorm, write your script, edit your footage, add effects, sound design, color correct and finish your product all with different professional software in that order. This makes creating a professional product a neat and orderly process, a welcoming thought to the alternative mess that awaits if using different software.
Adobe has made a strong case for why students should invest time into learning the software. If you’re reading this as a SCAD student and haven’t downloaded the Adobe package, now is a better time than never. It’s a good idea for future filmmakers to learn what will most likely become very prominent, and industry standard, software in the near future.