Software Introduction

Software Introduction

Premiere Pro (Premiere) is a professional video editing tool developed by Adobe Systems. It is a software for professional video editors to modify and insert effect to their videos and soundtracks. Premiere Pro first announced in 2003 and rapidly grew in the world. It is easy to use, the editor just needs to use a mouse click to trim the video and using drag and drop to move the video, audio, and other objects. All functions show visually and allow the user to see the change immediately. Nowadays, Premiere Pro is one of the mainstream professional video editing tools in the market. It is available for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. This report is going to analyze its version Creative Suite 6 (CS6) usability, which is announced in 2013, for professional video editors in learnability, flexibility, and robustness.

Screenshot of Premiere Pro

Learnability of Premiere Pro

Learnability is used to measure the easiness for users to begin effective interaction with the system and achieve maximal performance by using the software. 5 principles are used to determine software, including software’s predictability, synthesizability, familiarity, generalizability, and consistency.

Predictability

Premiere has a high degree of predictability and operation visibility. Premiere supports more than 30 video and audio formats[1] with ever-changing specifications under each format. To ensure that users use a suitable environment to do editing. Premiere provides an appropriate environment by using saved user settings of the project. Therefore, when the project is reopened, users can predict and ensure that they are in a suitable environment to do editing. Besides, Premiere will only show the function that can be used in the next step. If the function is not available for the next step, the specified function will turn grey and not allow the user to click. So, the user will not call an unusable function, and no need to determine whether the function can be performed in the next step.

Synthesizability

Premiere does not require the user to take any more action to check the result of each action since the result will display immediate right after every action is taken. For example, adding text to the video will display on the editing screen immediately. It shows its high level of synthesizability.

Familiarity

Premiere is easy for experienced video editors who are using other video editing tools since the layout design, and the application of Premiere is similar to other video editing tools in the market, including Final Cut Pro, PowerDirector, and iMovie. For the users using the traditional way to edit video, using scissors and filin, the process of trimming and connecting frames is mostly the same. This software is using the mouse to replace scissors to cut video into parts. Therefore, the video editors can comfortably familiar with using Premiere.

Interface of Final Cut Pro

Interface of PowerDirector

Interface of iMovie

Generalizability

Adobe has generalized Premiere to finish some of the action. For text editing, the operation of editing words is similar to the word processor. Therefore, the knowledge acquired in using a word processor can be implied in Premiere, including line/word spacing, aligning method, etc. Besides, Premiere is generalized its effect control allied with Flash editor. They both are using keying to control the movement of the object. So, the knowledge of keying can apply in Premiere.

Text Editor in Premiere Pro

Effect Controller in Premiere Pro

Consistency

Premiere is using block-based editing. The conceptual model for block-based is using drag and drop by using the mouse so the user would think of certain operations of moving objects in the software. In Premiere, the operations of adding and editing objects can be performed by mouse to drag the object, such as videos and photos, and put it in the project’s timeline.

Premiere has high predictability, synthesizability, familiarity, generalizability, and consistency. Therefore, it can help the user to communicate with the system and finish tasks effectively.

Flexibility of Premiere Pro

Premiere is an authoring software. Therefore, it is believed that Premiere provides high flexibility for creators to exchange information with the system so that creators can finish their desired creations in a diversity of ways. 5 principles will be taken into consideration, including dialog initiative, multi-threading, task migratability, substitutivity, and customizability to determine its flexibility.

Dialog initiative

For providing high flexibility for the creator to do different unique creations, Premiere is using user preemptive dialog. Users can initiate most of the functions in the software since nearly all the functionality of the software can be performed by just a mouse click, such as press the button to trim the video into two parts so that users unlikely will lose track of the tasks while having the freedom of editing.

Multi-threading

Premiere is using interleaved multi-threading. When the user needs to add or modify the title of the video, the software only allows the user to use the text editing dialog at that moment. Besides, when the user drags the video block in the software, any other actions unrelated to moving the block are restricted.

Task migratability

Premiere provides task migratability for the user to provide higher accuracy of moving video blocks and keying. With the “magnet” function built in the software, the creator can align the video right behind the previous video blocks or desire places. If the editor would like to do the video effect, which is not necessary to put the video block in exact places, the editor can ignore the “magnet” function depends on the editor’s preference.

Substitutivity

Premiere allows the user to choose which action best suits the user’s needs. For example, the user can point to the selected video and using the trim function point to cut the video by using a mouse click or can select the video and then press Ctrl + K on the keyboard.

Customizability

Premiere allow their user to change all component in the interface freely, including the size and location of the components’ panel. Users can also add or remove components that show on the window according to the user’s preference. To allow users can be sensitive in colouring, the interface also allows users to adjust the brightness of the interface, which is known as dark mode and white mode, so that this software can assist users in using the advantage of their eyes, the characteristic of rods and cones, during editing entirely. Therefore, Premiere has great adaptability. However, this software will not actively recognize the behavior of the user to adjust its dialog control for matching the need of the user. Therefore, Premiere Pro lacks the ability of adaptivity.

Considered the above 5 principles, it shows that Premiere has high relative flexibility.

Robustness of Premiere Pro

Premiere is a professional software designed for users to create extraordinary creations. Therefore its robustness is crucial for users. To determine its robustness, observability, recoverability, responsiveness, and task conformance will be discussed below.

Observability

Premiere can provide all necessary and useful information to the users, including frame rate, frame size, sound level meter, video length, etc. Users can browse that information easily at the interface without any side-effects. For avoiding users edit in a wrong or invalid environment, Premiere provides static default settings for users according to different standards in the world. Users can’t change the using standard that set before the project created, it limited the flexibility of the software. However, other settings, such as frame rate, frame size, etc., are allowed to change at any time.

When any error or notification needs to notify users, the error message will remain on the video editing screen until the problem is solved. Compared to just using sound notification and popup dialog boxes, this arrangement can effectively notice users solve the problem since some problem occurs in editing may not be notified by the user or user may forget easily in user’s short term memory, especially when the user is handling a large amount of object.

Recoverability

Nearly all the actions performed in Premiere support backward error recovery. According to Adobe’s website, the user is allowed to undo/redo the action taken as many as 32 recent changes made to the project in any Premiere Pro panel.

When an error occurs due to the operating system or software failure, the user can recover their project, which is autosaved during editing, even it may have some loss of data.

Responsiveness

All actions in the Premiere can respond as soon as a mouse button is pressed. For simple work like trimming video into two parts, the software can finish and show immediately. For the operations require a lot of computing power of the computer, the process bar will show immediately until the process is completed.

Task conformance

Premiere is used to perform video editing. Most of the video editing functions can be finished by this software. The effects have done in the software that can output to the outcome so that it is widely adopted in the market. Even though it provides limited animating function, however, for more advanced animation, another software “After Effect” is needed. Premiere also supports the output of After Effect so that users can create better creations.

Conclusion

Compared the learnability, flexibility, and robustness of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, Premiere shows its excellent performance in these three aspects. This result shows that Premiere Pro has high degree of usability. It may also the reason why it is popular among video editors and become one of mainstream video editing software in the world.

[1] Adobe Premiere Pro CC/CS6/CS5/CS4 Supported Video/Audio/Image Formats. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.acrok.com/adobe-premiere-pro-supported-formats/.