With Adobe Premiere Pro ($699 direct), the company upgraded most of the critical editing functions while retaining enough look and feel to make the program instantly familiar to users of previous versions. Though outperformed by competitors like Pinnacle Edition 5 and Sony's Vegas 4.0 (reviewed in "Video Editing."), in some discrete areas, Premiere Pro handles virtually all functions well, making it a no-brainer upgrade for current Premiere users and a strong candidate for anyone considering a prosumer-class editor.

Premiere Pro's interface is still dominated by a timeline on the bottom, a project window on the left, and source and preview windows in the center and upper right. Adobe did part company with the A|B roll-editing metaphor; this may confuse some users at first, but now you can use transitions on any track—a nice addition.

Also new is the ability to open multiple projects simultaneously and access them via tabs on the timeline. Though not as streamlined as Edition 5 or as clutter-resistant as Vegas, Premiere Pro is more intuitive.

Beyond the interface changes, Adobe focused its efforts on Premiere Pro's most glaring deficits. For example, with color correction, Premiere Pro introduces an all-purpose control with color wheels, histograms, and vector scopes. For less advanced users, Adobe includes an eyedropper tool to adjust pixels that should be black, gray, or white in a video. Premiere Pro adjusts the color balance automatically, but you can fine-tune it.

Motion controls have been completely revamped, though 3-D controls trail Edition 5's in ease of use and functionality. In Premiere Pro, you can set parameters via dials or by positioning the video in the preview window manually. We found the window cramped, especially compared with Vegas's wide- open motion design palette. But Premiere Pro's ability to set separate keyframes for parameters like scale, position, rotation, and opacity is extraordinarily useful for complex effects.

As with Premiere 6.5, Premiere Pro's transitions and 2-D and 3-D effects are unremarkable: Premiere's titling function, which was significantly upgraded in Version 6.5, remains the best available, with exquisite precision and excellent title design tools, as well as many professional-grade templates for business, wedding, music, nature, birthdays, and other events.

For chroma key and other video overlays, Adobe added separate key frame controls for blue-screen parameters like threshold, cutoff, and smoothing, though output quality trails that of Vegas. Vegas also proved superior when changing video speeds via velocity envelopes that smoothly transition from one speed (say, original speed) to the next (like slow- motion). In Premiere Pro, the controls are much less precise.

Similarly, Premiere Pro's picture-in-picture controls were less flexible than those of Edition 5: It pulled fewer streams without dropping frames during real-time preview. Specifically, on a workstation with a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Edition 5 retrieved six simultaneous streams without dropping frames; Premiere Pro managed only four.

One late product addition is the SteadyMove image stabilization plug-in from 2d3. Though most professionals shoot from tripods or with steadicams, this free plug-in produced good results on our tests, stabilizing our test video with little distortion.

On the audio front, Adobe made significant improvements, though some capabilities are a bit overstated. Premiere Pro retained the real-time, multitrack audio mixer while adding VST filter support and the ability to create track- and clip-based effects. It ships with 17 VST filters, including a competent noise-removal function.

Where Vegas includes surround sound and stereo AC-3 encoding in the base program, Premiere Pro forces you to buy a $299 plug-in from Minnetonka Audio for either feature after three trial runs. Those using Adobe Encore can produce stereo AC-3 files, but if you need surround-sound capabilities or your authoring program doesn't offer AC-3 encoding, budget another $299 for the plug-in. Also noteworthy is the absence of Sonic Desktop's SmartSound Quicktracks, a very useful background-music-track creator included in Version 6.5.

As our MPEG-2 Rendering test results show, Premiere Pro proved slightly slower than Ulead MediaStudio and Edition 5 but far faster than Vegas. Edition 5's background rendering also makes it much more efficient than Premiere Pro on projects rendered back to DV tape.

Cost is also a concern. For roughly the same price ($699), you can get integrated DVD authoring within Edition 5 or purchase Vegas plus DVD Architect. With Premiere Pro, you're likely to need not only Encore for authoring but also Photoshop for menu creation.

Overall, however, all video editors have their thorns: Edition has a difficult learning curve and very limited audio capabilities, and Vegas has limited special effects and awkward titling. Premiere Pro is good enough across the board to be a very worthy addition to Adobe's excellent suite of digital-content-creation tools. Those not entrenched in the toolset may want to consider other products, but few users will be disappointed with Premiere Pro.