By Oliver Peters, June 22, 2007
This summer will see the release of Adobe
Creative Suite 3 Production
Premium—the third element in Adobe’s new content creation
ecosystem. Production Premium includes the CS3 updates of Adobe
Premiere Pro CS3,
Encore, Illustrator and After
Effects Professional. These are joined by Soundbooth
CS3, a new audio application, the video-enabled Photoshop
CS3 Extended and applications
from the acquisitions of Serious Magic (Adobe OnLocation and Ultra
CS3) and
Macromedia (Flash CS3 Professional). The suite also includes value-added features
and software such as Dynamic
Link, Clip Notes, Adobe
Media Encoder, Bridge and
the new Adobe
Device Central. The latter is a previewing application designed
to emulate the performance and appearance of compressed files inside the profiles
of various target mobile devices, like specific cell phone models. The big news
for Mac fans is that all of these programs (except OnLocation and Ultra) run
on both Mac Intel and Windows computers.
Adobe has put a lot of effort into unifying the user interfaces and
refining the interoperability among the applications in this suite. The more
established Adobe applications have the most consistent look and feel, while
the newest—OnLocation, Ultra and Flash Professional—retain
a lot of their previous design. Although Production Premium comes with a lot
of depth, I’m sure most video editors will focus on Adobe Premiere
Pro, Encore, Soundbooth and Photoshop Extended.
Premiere Pro CS3
New users will find Adobe Premiere
Pro CS3 to be a highly capable NLE.
Specific new features include the ability to open multiple projects and a new,
easy-to-use time-remapping function. The latter is a vast improvement over other
remapping approaches, but slo-mo quality is based on blended frames. If you want
slow motion with true in-between frames, Adobe added the Timewarp filter from
After Effects, which analyzes pixel motion to generate these in-between frames.
Time remapping is accessed from the timeline, just like opacity changes, while
Timewarp is an applied filter. Bins can now open separately, if you like, and
include a Find line that works in a similar fashion to Mac OS X’s Spotlight
search function.
Encore CS3 enables direct Flash and Blu-ray authoring, and Adobe
Premiere Pro CS3 is tightly linked to Encore CS3, so editors now have the ability
to create DVD, Flash and Blu-ray products straight from the Adobe Premiere Pro
interface. Two key features might win you over from another NLE: Dynamic Link
and Clip Notes.
When you send Adobe Premiere Pro timeline clips over to After Effects
for advanced compositing, Dynamic
Link places an After Effects composition into
your sequence. The changes made in After Effects are updated and also displayed
in Adobe Premiere Pro. If you render a timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro, After
Effects projects contained in that sequence are rendered by a runtime After Effects
rendering engine without you actually having to open the application. Alternately,
you may copy and paste clips between both applications and all native filters
and keyframes will follow.
Clip
Notes—the only built-in review-and-approval tool in
any NLE—is now in both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. When you
export a sequence for Clip Notes, the media is encoded (or linked) inside a PDF
document that can be e-mailed to your client. Using only Acrobat Reader, clients
can review the file and enter timecode-specific remarks in the comment box. The
client then saves this as a data file without the media, which in turn can be
e-mailed back to the editor. Once the file is imported into Adobe Premiere Pro
CS3, markers and comments appear on the editor’s timeline at those
specific timecode locations.
Editors working with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 in a mixed Windows/Mac
environment will find that project files can be exchanged, but media files are
a different story. Mac users generally work with QuickTime media, whereas Windows
users are used to AVI files, and these are not equally optimized for both systems.
The available codecs will be based on the standard codecs used on each system—or
others added by hardware vendors, like Matrox—so there is no guarantee
that you can move a complete job with media between Macs and PCs. Support for
data interchange with non-Adobe systems is a little weak at this point. The Mac
version offers only EDL support, while the Windows version includes AAF and OMF
options.
Encore CS3
Adobe has leveraged Flash technology for the video
editor. Those who aren’t ready to tackle Flash
Professional will find that Encore
CS3 provides an easy alternative. You can now author standard DVDs, Blu-ray DVDs
and interactive SWF files from a common project. Advanced interactive Flash authoring
features won’t be available, of course, but the SWF files you create
will have the same degree of interactivity on the Web as a standard DVD. Encore
CS3 takes care of creating the proper Web elements for a Flash project, but the
Web page and media file sizes are limited to 640x480. Encore is an easy authoring
application to master, with automatic encoding features and a flowchart view
that can actually be used for true linking. Encore CS3 ships with plenty of royalty-free
content, including menu templates in both SD and HD formats.
Soundbooth CS3
Adobe Audition has been replaced
in the video collection with Soundbooth
CS3, a new audio application designed for video editors
and Web designers. Soundbooth CS3 combines powerful two-track editing and mastering
tools with custom music scoring. Audition’s signature audio healing tools have been integrated
into Soundbooth CS3. The same spectral view is used to remove noise, but the
interface has been simplified so that fewer sliders are used to achieve the same
results. Fifteen EQ and effects filters are included, as well as the iZotope
Radius engine for time stretch and pitch shift. Then there’s AutoComposer,
a music scoring feature reminiscent of Sony
Cinescore or SmartSound Sonicfire
Pro. Soundbooth’s algorithm automatically arranges musical segments
to match the length and intensity desired. As you adjust the Intensity slider,
Soundbooth automatically changes the arrangement of the score from one with prominent
lead instruments and a strong melody to one that is more subdued and intended
as an underscore. The application ships with 3,300 sound effects and 40 royalty-free
scores.
After Effects CS3 Professional
Adobe’s bread-and-butter film and video tool sports a
ton of new features that are “must-haves” for motion graphics designers.
Photoshop now supports video as layers, and these layers can be brought into
After Effects. Photoshop’s 3D Vanishing
Point scene data can be imported
into After Effects for 3D compositing. Animators will go nuts over the new Puppet
Tool. Any object can be moved, squashed or stretched by pinning joints with graphic “push
pins” and dragging these pins to desired positions to create animation
keyframes. In the right hands, Puppet Tool can create very convincing 2D character
animation from static graphics.
A powerful vector shape tool, Shape
Layers, has been added to After
Effects. Preset or custom shapes can be created, modified and animated in various
patterns. You get extremely interesting results when combining these with Brainstorm,
a powerful new visualization tool. Brainstorm takes your animation as a starting
point and randomly creates nine variations. Adjust the randomness and generate
more previews until you are satisfied. It’s a quick way to add a spark
of inspiration through automated trial and error. After Effects CS3 Professional
is more optimized for multiprocessor machines, especially the 8-core
Mac Pros.
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Adobe CS3 Production Premium includes the Extended
version of Photoshop CS3. It’s the first to incorporate video—all
controlled through a new Animation
palette. You can paint on video or add the new nondestructive
Smart
Filters. Another cool feature is automatic
layer alignment and blending.
You can place multiple related images in the same document and Photoshop will
analyze content and intelligently move, rotate, overlap and blend layers. The
result is a single scene that takes the best parts of each.
Location to Distribution
I’ve concentrated on post, but
Production Premium includes apps for studio and location production. OnLocation (formerly DV Rack) is a powerful monitoring and recording tool that runs on a
laptop or desktop system. Even Mac users benefit if they run it under Boot
Camp or on a different low-cost Windows laptop. It monitors DV or HDV video over FireWire
to provide accurate video, waveform and vectorscope displays on a laptop screen.
Since video is already coming into the computer, OnLocation turns it into a direct-to-disk
video recorder. As such, it captures any incoming video in the native format,
complete with a pre-record buffer. For example, if you set the buffer to 30 seconds,
your file will include the 30 seconds prior to when you pressed record.
Ultra
CS3 rounds out the acquisition software. This is a high-quality,
vector-based keyer combined with a 3D virtual set package. The keyer can be used
without the virtual
sets, but the stock 3D backgrounds include various angles
for wide, medium and close shots. Some even include camera tracking information
to composite and match your on-camera talent with 3D camera moves. Ultra CS3
ships with 12 virtual sets built with high-resolution texture maps, so Ultra
CS3 can be used for SD and HD composites.
At the opposite end are Flash Professional and Device Central. If
you want to dive into more elaborate, interactive Flash design than Encore CS3
can offer, then Flash
CS3 Professional is the right tool. New features support
closed captioning and alpha channels from After Effects. With all the emphasis
on mobile distribution, Device
Central should prove to be handy. Adobe has profiled
a range of mobile devices that use the Flash Lite player, and Device Central
shows you how your video will look in the graphic skin of a given cell phone
model. It also emulates the performance of your encoded video on that target
device so you have a chance to make adjustments before distributing the file.
Adobe plans to offer a developer’s kit for device manufacturers to
add new profiles and update Device Central.
Adobe has long designed software that turns visual applications into
true communication tools. The BBC has even picked CS3 Production Premium as an
option for its Creative
Desktop Initiative. There are enough high-end features
to pique the interest of seasoned film and video professionals, but, more importantly,
Adobe has assembled the ideal package for mainstream commercial, broadcast and
corporate video shops all over the world. Now it’s easier than ever
to start with a single concept and set of elements and create the whole gamut
of today’s deliverables: broadcast, Web, DVD and mobile. No other manufacturer
has addressed this workflow as elegantly as Adobe.
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