Reviewed
By: Jeremy Hanke
with Justin
Pugh & Ryan
Graham
Final
Score:
10.0
Before
I and my colleagues give you the full, in-depth breakdown behind CS3:
Production Premium, allow me to give you the thumbnail review to prepare you
for the overall feel of this piece.
Thumbnail:
2005’s Adobe Production Studio Premium was such a staggering stride into
integration and value that it literally rendered my Final Cut Studio setup obsolete
in my eyes. At $1699, it blew the doors off any other package you could assemble
that had half the creative controls. This year, they improve every program that
made APSP great, add in a brand spankin’ new video version of Photoshop,
swap the audio-designed Audition for the video-specific Soundbooth, and then give
you Flash CS3, OnLocation CS3 (for monitoring and recording footage on location),
and Ultra CS3 (for monitoring and keying greenscreen footage) at no additional
charge. Oh yeah, and, aside from the Serious Magic programs, they made a full
Mac conversion so that our Mac readers can use CS3: Production Premium on the
Mac. With that said, if 2005’s APSP got a 10, then guess what 2007’s
CS3: Production Premium is likely to get? That’s right, an eleven! Okay,
not an eleven, as we don’t go to eleven. But you get the point.
Now,
for those of you who have read past the thumbnail, I will provide a couple of
additional provisos. While the overall improvement and additions to Production
Premium easily earn it a ten, it is not without its problems. Many of the
newer additions still need sanding and retooling to more completely fit within
the overall flow of the Production Premium bundle. As such, this review
will look at many of the new features and examine which products got the most
improvements, which got the least, and which ones still need a bit of work.
CS3: Production Premium boasts an increased software package along with virtually every package boastin a number of improvements, like this new feature of After Effects CS3 which allows individual parts of 3D text to be rotated discreetly.
Ease
of Use Adobe
has always made extremely powerful software and, as with all powerful software,
there is a learning curve. However, because Adobe tries to make their programs
behave in a pretty similar way and use many of the same shortcut keys, the learning
curve is much less with this package if you have any experience with other Adobe
products.
With
that said, I still recommend that you get some training to get the most out of
this package. Total Training recently released an online training package that
they give a year’s subscription worth of with the purchase of one of their
DVD their packages. (This online training is so amazingly well designed that I
hope they’ll just let you buy a year’s subscription by itself before
too long.)
As
you get some training and start playing with this package, the majority of the
components are so well dovetailed that it becomes impressively easy to use. Before
long, you’re designing 3D buildings in PhotoshopCS3 Extended
and exporting into After Effects for final animations and lighting. (More
on that later.)
Depth
of Options
The amount of options in this package is so vast, that I’m going to keep
this segment related to the newest features that each program is offering, otherwise
this review will be 976 pages long! Many of these segments have standalone reviews,
so I have provided a link to the ones that apply.
Premiere Pro CS3's new time remapping feature allows you to create adjustable slow-motion effects with the power of After Effects directly in the timeline of Premiere Pro.
Premiere
ProCS3
While Premiere Pro may be the one program that
has seen the fewest improvements of all the CS3 line, this is not terribly
bad because all the other programs work in such harmony with Premiere Pro that it doesn’t have to have as many improvements to grow stronger in this
release. The biggest new addition that’s been incorporated is the addition
of the TimeRemapping and PixelMotion slow-mos that were introduced in After
Effects 7. This is very helpful because, for those of us that love a good
slow-mo, it’s nice to not have to go into After Effects to create
it. Other improvements come in the form of more easily accessible search capabilities and
the abilty to open multiple project panels, so that you can look at folders in both list view and Icon View, which can
certainly speed up roughing out an edit.
