In one of our edit bays, our engineers just installed a Mac computer that has Adobe Premiere Pro on it. Latest I heard was that they’ll eventually replace all our Avids with Premiere as part of our transition to HD. So for now I’m dabbling around in the Premiere, reading the help sections, looking at some of the tuturials, and last night did a practice edit of a package with raw P2 files that I had already used to edit a package on Avid earlier that night. Doing that helps me to come up with questions I might have about how I can do certain things in Premiere that I’m used to being able to do in Avid. I’m sure I’ll eventually be able to figure most of them out through product support, but thought I’d throw these questions out to anyone on this forum who has worked with BOTH Avid and Premiere and might know the answers:

1. When I edit using P2 clips in Avid, the first thing I usually do is arrange all the P2 clips in the order in which they were shot, select them all, and drag them into the timeline to create a raw sequence. I use that as an overall source sequence, mainly to make it easier for the reporter to log, but sometimes I also drag that raw sequence into the source monitor and edit from it into my package timeline, rather than clicking into 55 different individual clips in my bin. In order for this to work for both logging and editing, I need for this raw sequence to show the source timecode (timecode of the original clips). In Avid, I can do that by right-clicking on the counter display next to the monitor on the interface, and navigating through the drop-down list to select "V1" as the counter display. Does Premiere have a way to do that? There does seem to be a counter display next to the monitors, but right clicking them doesn’t give me those same display options that Avid does.

2. In Avid, if I right-click on the timeline, a drop-down menu gives me options to do several things, including "Add Filler At Start", "Find Flash Frame", and "Find Black Hole". Can Premiere do that, and if so, how?

3. In Avid, if I have, lets say, 20 clips in a row, and I want the channel 2 audio to be set to -20 dB on all of them, I can put an "in" point somewhere in the first clip and and "out" point in the last clip, go to the audio mixer tool, set ch2 in any one of those clips to -20 and then click on a drop-down in that tool to select "set level in-out". Can Premiere do that? How?

4. In Avid, if I have lets say, 20 clips in a row, and I want to apply the same size dissolve on all 19 cuts between them, I can put and in point somewhere in the first clip and and outpoint in the last clip. Then when I apply a dissolve to one of the cuts, the dissolve window gives me an option "apply to all transitions in-out" and "skip existing transitions." Click OK and in one easy step it puts dissolves in all 19 cuts that are between the in and out points. Can Premiere do that? How?

5. In Avid, if I want to chop off the end or beginning of a soundbite or track, I can in most Avid keyboard settings I can do that with the "P" and "]" buttons, and then it just snaps the rest of the stuff on the sequence up to where I’d made the cut. How can I do that in Premiere?

I’m sure I’ll think of other questions as I go along, but hopefully some of you can help me with those five.