With that said, there are a few detractions from ease of use. Largely, these issues come from the conversion to an all 64 bit environment for Premiere Pro and After Effects. (Photoshop 64-bit also comes with this suite, along with a 32-bit variant, but this was rolled out in CS4, so it's not exactly new.) For Mac users, this isn't much of an issue, as Macs have been 64-bit exclusively for a number of OS releases now. (Interestingly, Apple's FCP software is still only 32-bit.) For Windows users, however, this means you will have to be sure that you got the 64-bit version of Vista or Windows 7, or you will be unable to run these programs. (They've included a copy of Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4, in case you want to use some of the functionality of the other programs while you're waiting to update to a 64-bit environment. Interestingly, Premiere Pro CS4 will open up Premiere Pro CS5 files. After Effects CS5 will require you to create a new file when you import a CS4 file, however you can still open up this file in CS4—minus the CS5 plugins, of course.)
However, it's not just the operating system that this effects. It's ALL of your plugins. None of your old plugins will work in the CS5 versions either Premiere Pro or After Effects, which means you will have to download new versions of these plugins. While some plugin manufacturers, like Red Giant, aren't charging for these updates, a number of manufacturers are using this as a time to launch new versions of their plugins for CS5 with upgrade pricing. Unfortunately, some of these new versions are less powerful than their predecessors, so, in those cases, you'll pay upgrading pricing to get a less powerful plugin than you're used to. (Mark Bremmer recently reviewed Damage v2, which stripped away some of its most powerful preset saving abilities in the new CS5 release.) To further complicate things, nearly five months after the official release, not all of the plugin manufacturers have released their CS5 compatible plugins yet.
While I admire Adobe for really taking the plunge on the 64-bit conversion, I'm left wondering why they couldn't have created a legacy plugin option for folks who are willing to sacrifice some speed in exchange for using much loved older plugins.
The new Roto Brush tool in After Effects has a lot of potential. While it's a bit limited in its current incarnation, its robustness will likely improve substantially in CS6.
Depth of Options
As you can imagine, there are a ton of new features that Adobe has rolled out in CS5, so I will touch on them in terms of both buzz and personal opinion on importance. Although I'm not going to do a mini-review of all the programs, it is useful to know what all comes with this package. The in-box offerings are: Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5, OnLocation CS5, Encore CS5, Soundbooth CS5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CS5, Flash CS5, Bridge CS5, Device Central CS5, Dynamic Link, and, new to CS5, Flash Catalyst CS5. The online offerings are free for all creative suite owners and include Adobe's new online script software, Story, as well as the new CS Review program (an online way to proof video clips with multiple collaborators). Here we are going to look at new and improved abilities in this set. (The performance improvements offered in the 64-bit version of CS5 and the newly created Mercury engine for Premiere Pro will be covered in our Performance section.)
For filmmakers, arguably the most intriguing new feature of CS5 is AE's Roto Brush tool. The example of this that was shown before a group of us in January at Adobe Headquarters left us all champing at the bit to try it out. (The demo showed two people shaking hands, the background fading to black while the hands stayed crisply in focus, and, then, the hand shake pushes past the camera as the next scene dissolves into view.) As someone who spent numerous hours doing rotoscoping on Nick Denney's The Guardian and my own film, Depleted: Day 419, I was super psyched to try out this tool that could make all of this hard work a thing of the past. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, rotoscoping is the act of manually cutting a matte out of a piece of video footage. Most often this is done if a character is passing in "front" of an artificially created background image or something is supposed to pass through a character's body, like a bullet, for example.)
The new Flash Catalyst program makes multimedia design much simpler for non-coders.
As there was a lot of roto work necessary in Depleted: Day 419, I used it as a testing ground for the plugin. The concept behind the plugin is that you choose a layer of video footage and then simply paint with the Roto Brush (which is like a video version of Photoshop CS4's Quick Selection Tool) the areas you want the program to track. It will then track frame by frame your selection and adjust for motion. You can tweak some of the main parameters, but, largely, you just play the footage until the selection gets off track and then you correct the selection. Great concept, but, as you might expect, it still has a number of first generation bugs in it.
