Adobe Creative Suite 3: a premium offering for video production professionals
It is being called the single largest software release in the company’s history – and it’s one of the most anticipated.
As such, it’s also one of the most expensive – listing at $1,699 – and most resource intensive: the minimum recommended drive space just to load the program is 23.5GB. A bare minimum 1GB of RAM is required to get the most from the software, as is a Pentium 4 1.4 GHz processor.
With these caveats aside, it is great news - Adobe’s new Creative Suite 3 Production Premium Suite (one of three new CS3 bundles, the other two focused on graphics and Web work) is now available.
Of course, Adobe includes a whack of applications critical to the dedicated videomaker - Premiere Pro for editing, Encore for DVD authoring, After Effects for compositing and VFX creation, Photoshop for touch-ups and image manipulation and Illustrator for text and vector graphics creation. One could be happy and content right there, but the company has also added other interesting and intriguing media apps to the suite: the familiar Flash, Soundbooth (a task-based tool that replaces Audition), OnLocation (formerly known as DV Rack) and Ultra CS3 (a chromakey and virtual set tool).
These last two apps come to Adobe by way of its acquisition of Serious Magic, a great little digital media company. Luckily, these unique programs have only gained from the transition.
Adobe’s well-known strength in bringing a consistent look and feel to its interface is evident throughout this new release, and also in its integration of what were once Macromedia (also acquired by Adobe with integration in this release) and Serious Magic assets. Let’s look at the core programs first.
Premiere Pro CS3
Save for the fact this popular video editing program has returned to the Mac, it has not undergone many changes. Given the fact that the previous version, Premiere Pro 2, was a somewhat disruptive release, perhaps that’s for the better.
It is still a powerful and sophisticated editing program, capable of handling DV and HD, among other video formats. It can still output finished programs to tape, disk, mobile device or Internet stream.
And there are some cool new features. Handling HDV files is much smoother and more accurate with Premiere Pro CS3. You can also now open different bins at the same time, making transfer of captured video or other files easier to move, copy and paste between bins.
Previews can be enabled or disabled, too, which is handy if you have lots of clips that need rendering and you don't want to wait for Premiere to update all of those files on the timeline. Just click on the icon and Premiere will disable previews.
New as well is time remapping, a feature that lets you create variable-rate time stretches directly in the timeline; you can now see the clip getting longer or shorter, depending on the clip speed that you choose.
Time remapping has been available in After Effects for a while, but now it’s in Premiere. Speed changes are keyframeable, and a soft "ease in or out" command brings a nice sense of realism to things that get slower or faster over time.
Encore CS3
With the new Encore, you can author standard DVD titles, Blu-ray discs and even Web-based Flash presentations much in the same way that you always have – fully menu-driven, with linked chapters, customized buttons and a fully-interactive and user navigable interface. Blu-ray is becoming increasingly popular as a distribution medium, and anyone with a Sony PlayStation 3 or compatible player can watch your burned disc.
Encore does allow you to create visual and editorial effects right on the timeline, and it gives added slow motion and time-remapping effect control with precise keyframe placement and real-time feedback. You can add colour correction, lighting and other effects, audio filters and so on. As has been one of its video strengths in Premiere, Encore now accepts edited footage from multicam shoots with ease and precision.
By the way, perhaps because of a lot of this functional overlap, Encore will no longer be available by itself.
Soundbooth CS3
Previous Adobe video bundles included Audition, Adobe’s professional audio-editing application (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro). Soundbooth is a simpler, one-click-and-you-are-done audio processing software.
Soundbooth is well-designed for video editors with little or no experience in audio (you know who you are if you say "louder" instead of "normalizing"). The application is powerful, but the interface is very graphical and uncomplicated.
With Soundbooth, trim, fade and volume controls are really simple to use, and so are the audio cleanup features. Soundbooth shows other tabbed functions on the left side of the screen - you simply choose the function that you want (audio cleanup, score creator, etc.). The new Spectral view is great for cleaning up unwanted frequency-specific noises from audio clips (cough, cell phone, 60 cycle hum, etc.). You can literally "see" the sound on screen, and quickly eliminate it (and any others like it).
Needless to say, you can access Soundbooth from within Premiere Pro, simply by right-clicking an audio clip and choosing Edit in Adobe Soundbooth > Render and Replace. This will open a copy of the clip in Soundbooth, leaving the original untouched.
After Effects CS3
Adobe went all out in the new After Effects CS3 version. New features like Shape Layers and the Puppet Tool make it the crowning achievement of this release to some eyes. Using the new Puppet Tool is a hoot! It lets you to add "pins" or points to a still layer that you can then use to animate different parts of the layer. "Dancing" text, animated objects, motion graphics and much, much more can be created simply and easily.
After Effects CS3 also supports the new video layers in Photoshop CS3 Extended (more on that later), which makes rotoscoping inside of Photoshop and re-importing into After Effects easy and intuitive.
Vanishing point is an important new feature in After Effects. It lets you work with Photoshop to create planes on a still image for applying 3D animation. It works especially well with images of buildings, for example, where the 2D planes are easily identified and then exported to After Effects, where a fully 3D composition of your still is ready to be animated with a keyframe technique.
Also new is the ability to animate and replicate vector graphics in order to create cool backgrounds and graphic elements. Folks who have worked in Illustrator know how exciting this is. Shapes, layers, animation and more can be added across resolutions and to each individual parameter that a graphic file includes.
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Because Photoshop has been out for a couple of months and is covered elsewhere, we’ll just mention some new video-centric features.
As usual, Photoshop is at the heart of the enhanced integration features in CS3 Production Premium. Regardless of the primary editing or composition application you use, Photoshop remains a constant in the video/print/web world.
Photoshop imports video; After Effects reads this video. Send a DVD menu directly into Photoshop or After Effects for animation or editing, and bring it back into Encore DVD for authoring, seamlessly and without rendering.
In this release, Photoshop’s new Movie support app lets you retouch videos one frame at a time (great for rotoscoping!), with a familiar After Effects-like interface. There’s also lots and lots of support for video and compositing applications (like After Effects, as discussed earlier).
Flash
One of the most exciting additions to the Production Premium is Flash CS3. For those of you who don’t know Flash, it's an application designed for (among many other things) delivery of content through the Web, or even interactive (computer-play only) DVDs. Flash has a market penetration of more than 96 percent on computers that are used to browse the Internet, so almost everyone with a computer is capable of playing Flash files. You can now export Flash video with markers or cue points that trigger a specific event while your Flash video is playing. Graphics, subtitles, another video clip - you name it! You can easily update your whole presentation just by updating that one file, not the whole video. You can also copy and paste from Photoshop and Illustrator directly into Flash and retain the layer styles.
Ultra CS3 (Windows only)
Ultra CS3 is another application formerly owned by Serious Magic and now integrated into the Adobe suites. It’s used for easy and accurate chromakeying and virtual-set compositing. This release, available for Windows only, doesn’t change much from the Serious Magic version, but it brings some great new functionality to the Production Premium suite.
For those of you who do not know Ultra, this product lets you key backgrounds, even those encumbered with wrinkles and uneven lighting. Of course, Ultra supports all standard DV and HDV resolutions.
OnLocation CS3
Formerly known as DV Rack from Serious Magic, OnLocation is a powerful diagnostic and monitoring tool for recording DV and HDV content directly from a FireWire-equipped camera to a laptop or hard drive.
OnLocation displays (on your laptop's screen) valuable diagnostic information about your video clips, including Zebra displays and help with White Balance, Safe Zones, Scopes, Audio levels, camera calibration and more. It does not affect the video, but it carefully measures and monitors it, giving you greater confidence on location. You can start and stop record, log clips and write scene names, descriptions and so on.
OnLocation can also be used to help match shots from one location to another or one day to a different day through scope comparisons and measurements, making post production efforts (especially colour correction and audio) that much easier.
To use OnLocation on a Mac, you will need the BootCamp platform transcoder.
On the way out: CS3 Media Encoder and Device Central
You can now use Adobe Media Encoder (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Soundbooth and Encore DVD) to export your work for a wide variety of audiences and target devices, with newly included support for 3GPP and H.264 content. There’s also a new Device Central preview feature, letting you see you a realistic preview of how your particular file will look in a specific cell phone (or iPod, or whatever).
Taken together, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium is a powerful set of video tools, intended for the professional or working videographer. Hobbyists and weekend warriors will probably be better served by "scaled down" versions like Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. But if you make a living from video, or if you intend to, this suite is the way to go.
It is being called the single largest software release in the company’s history – and it’s one of the most anticipated.
As such, it’s also one of the most expensive – listing at $1,699 – and most resource intensive: the minimum recommended drive space just to load the program is 23.5GB. A bare minimum 1GB of RAM is required to get the most from the software, as is a Pentium 4 1.4 GHz processor.
With these caveats aside, it is great news - Adobe’s new Creative Suite 3 Production Premium Suite (one of three new CS3 bundles, the other two focused on graphics and Web work) is now available.
Of course, Adobe includes a whack of applications critical to the dedicated videomaker - Premiere Pro for editing, Encore for DVD authoring, After Effects for compositing and VFX creation, Photoshop for touch-ups and image manipulation and Illustrator for text and vector graphics creation. One could be happy and content right there, but the company has also added other interesting and intriguing media apps to the suite: the familiar Flash, Soundbooth (a task-based tool that replaces Audition), OnLocation (formerly known as DV Rack) and Ultra CS3 (a chromakey and virtual set tool).
These last two apps come to Adobe by way of its acquisition of Serious Magic, a great little digital media company. Luckily, these unique programs have only gained from the transition.
Adobe’s well-known strength in bringing a consistent look and feel to its interface is evident throughout this new release, and also in its integration of what were once Macromedia (also acquired by Adobe with integration in this release) and Serious Magic assets. Let’s look at the core programs first.
Premiere Pro CS3
Save for the fact this popular video editing program has returned to the Mac, it has not undergone many changes. Given the fact that the previous version, Premiere Pro 2, was a somewhat disruptive release, perhaps that’s for the better.
It is still a powerful and sophisticated editing program, capable of handling DV and HD, among other video formats. It can still output finished programs to tape, disk, mobile device or Internet stream.
And there are some cool new features. Handling HDV files is much smoother and more accurate with Premiere Pro CS3. You can also now open different bins at the same time, making transfer of captured video or other files easier to move, copy and paste between bins.
Previews can be enabled or disabled, too, which is handy if you have lots of clips that need rendering and you don't want to wait for Premiere to update all of those files on the timeline. Just click on the icon and Premiere will disable previews.
New as well is time remapping, a feature that lets you create variable-rate time stretches directly in the timeline; you can now see the clip getting longer or shorter, depending on the clip speed that you choose.
Time remapping has been available in After Effects for a while, but now it’s in Premiere. Speed changes are keyframeable, and a soft "ease in or out" command brings a nice sense of realism to things that get slower or faster over time.
Encore CS3
With the new Encore, you can author standard DVD titles, Blu-ray discs and even Web-based Flash presentations much in the same way that you always have – fully menu-driven, with linked chapters, customized buttons and a fully-interactive and user navigable interface. Blu-ray is becoming increasingly popular as a distribution medium, and anyone with a Sony PlayStation 3 or compatible player can watch your burned disc.
Encore does allow you to create visual and editorial effects right on the timeline, and it gives added slow motion and time-remapping effect control with precise keyframe placement and real-time feedback. You can add colour correction, lighting and other effects, audio filters and so on. As has been one of its video strengths in Premiere, Encore now accepts edited footage from multicam shoots with ease and precision.
By the way, perhaps because of a lot of this functional overlap, Encore will no longer be available by itself.
Soundbooth CS3
Previous Adobe video bundles included Audition, Adobe’s professional audio-editing application (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro). Soundbooth is a simpler, one-click-and-you-are-done audio processing software.
Soundbooth is well-designed for video editors with little or no experience in audio (you know who you are if you say "louder" instead of "normalizing"). The application is powerful, but the interface is very graphical and uncomplicated.
With Soundbooth, trim, fade and volume controls are really simple to use, and so are the audio cleanup features. Soundbooth shows other tabbed functions on the left side of the screen - you simply choose the function that you want (audio cleanup, score creator, etc.). The new Spectral view is great for cleaning up unwanted frequency-specific noises from audio clips (cough, cell phone, 60 cycle hum, etc.). You can literally "see" the sound on screen, and quickly eliminate it (and any others like it).
Needless to say, you can access Soundbooth from within Premiere Pro, simply by right-clicking an audio clip and choosing Edit in Adobe Soundbooth > Render and Replace. This will open a copy of the clip in Soundbooth, leaving the original untouched.
After Effects CS3
Adobe went all out in the new After Effects CS3 version. New features like Shape Layers and the Puppet Tool make it the crowning achievement of this release to some eyes. Using the new Puppet Tool is a hoot! It lets you to add "pins" or points to a still layer that you can then use to animate different parts of the layer. "Dancing" text, animated objects, motion graphics and much, much more can be created simply and easily.
After Effects CS3 also supports the new video layers in Photoshop CS3 Extended (more on that later), which makes rotoscoping inside of Photoshop and re-importing into After Effects easy and intuitive.
Vanishing point is an important new feature in After Effects. It lets you work with Photoshop to create planes on a still image for applying 3D animation. It works especially well with images of buildings, for example, where the 2D planes are easily identified and then exported to After Effects, where a fully 3D composition of your still is ready to be animated with a keyframe technique.
Also new is the ability to animate and replicate vector graphics in order to create cool backgrounds and graphic elements. Folks who have worked in Illustrator know how exciting this is. Shapes, layers, animation and more can be added across resolutions and to each individual parameter that a graphic file includes.
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Because Photoshop has been out for a couple of months and is covered elsewhere, we’ll just mention some new video-centric features.
As usual, Photoshop is at the heart of the enhanced integration features in CS3 Production Premium. Regardless of the primary editing or composition application you use, Photoshop remains a constant in the video/print/web world.
Photoshop imports video; After Effects reads this video. Send a DVD menu directly into Photoshop or After Effects for animation or editing, and bring it back into Encore DVD for authoring, seamlessly and without rendering.
In this release, Photoshop’s new Movie support app lets you retouch videos one frame at a time (great for rotoscoping!), with a familiar After Effects-like interface. There’s also lots and lots of support for video and compositing applications (like After Effects, as discussed earlier).
Flash
One of the most exciting additions to the Production Premium is Flash CS3. For those of you who don’t know Flash, it's an application designed for (among many other things) delivery of content through the Web, or even interactive (computer-play only) DVDs. Flash has a market penetration of more than 96 percent on computers that are used to browse the Internet, so almost everyone with a computer is capable of playing Flash files. You can now export Flash video with markers or cue points that trigger a specific event while your Flash video is playing. Graphics, subtitles, another video clip - you name it! You can easily update your whole presentation just by updating that one file, not the whole video. You can also copy and paste from Photoshop and Illustrator directly into Flash and retain the layer styles.
Ultra CS3 (Windows only)
Ultra CS3 is another application formerly owned by Serious Magic and now integrated into the Adobe suites. It’s used for easy and accurate chromakeying and virtual-set compositing. This release, available for Windows only, doesn’t change much from the Serious Magic version, but it brings some great new functionality to the Production Premium suite.
For those of you who do not know Ultra, this product lets you key backgrounds, even those encumbered with wrinkles and uneven lighting. Of course, Ultra supports all standard DV and HDV resolutions.
OnLocation CS3
Formerly known as DV Rack from Serious Magic, OnLocation is a powerful diagnostic and monitoring tool for recording DV and HDV content directly from a FireWire-equipped camera to a laptop or hard drive.
OnLocation displays (on your laptop's screen) valuable diagnostic information about your video clips, including Zebra displays and help with White Balance, Safe Zones, Scopes, Audio levels, camera calibration and more. It does not affect the video, but it carefully measures and monitors it, giving you greater confidence on location. You can start and stop record, log clips and write scene names, descriptions and so on.
OnLocation can also be used to help match shots from one location to another or one day to a different day through scope comparisons and measurements, making post production efforts (especially colour correction and audio) that much easier.
To use OnLocation on a Mac, you will need the BootCamp platform transcoder.
On the way out: CS3 Media Encoder and Device Central
You can now use Adobe Media Encoder (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Soundbooth and Encore DVD) to export your work for a wide variety of audiences and target devices, with newly included support for 3GPP and H.264 content. There’s also a new Device Central preview feature, letting you see you a realistic preview of how your particular file will look in a specific cell phone (or iPod, or whatever).
Taken together, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium is a powerful set of video tools, intended for the professional or working videographer. Hobbyists and weekend warriors will probably be better served by "scaled down" versions like Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. But if you make a living from video, or if you intend to, this suite is the way to go.
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