Software
Review: Adobe Production
Studio Premium, Pg. 2
Ease
of Use
To streamline the installation of the products, Adobe
has included all the software in 5 sequential discs which
install back to back. This is done to show that the Production
Studio is designed to work as a single entity, rather
than the a collection of products, as it did in the Adobe
Video Collection. The installation progresses simply,
although it will use up rather sizeable chunk of hard
drive with over 21 gigs required for installation.
We
found that package installed easily on our new dual P4
Dell test machine with a couple of gigs of RAM as well
as a basic 2 Ghz P4 desktop with only 512 MB of RAM. (Obviously,
performance was much better on the newer machine, but
the slower machine did a decent job on SD projects that
didn't use the Dynamic Link too much.) The only PC that
had issues was a 2 Ghz AMD Athlon that was going to be
our low end test machine. It wouldn't install at all on
this machine because Adobe Production Studio requires
an SSE2 instruction set enabled processor, which didn't
become integrated into AMD processors until the Opteron
and Athlon 64.
Once
you get everything installed properly, you will immediately
notice the more streamlined look of the customizable windows
in all four of the core products. (Both Photoshop
& Illustrator, while expanded with improved
layout options, do not replicate the overall layout design
of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, and Audition.)
They all feature a more professional looking dark gray
finish that resembles both Final Cut and Avid's
overall color schemes. To further make you feel at home,
for Final Cut users who are switching platforms,
Premiere Pro will even let you choose to use keyboard
shortcuts from Final Cut to make things flow much
simpler. (Most keyboard commands are represented in this
switch-over, with the notable exception of the Render
command which is frozen as the default Premiere Pro
'Enter' key.) I at first used the Final Cut defaults,
but switched back to the Premiere Pro defaults
due to how many identical Adobe shortcuts are now available
in all of the programs, especially the core four.
As
you create a project in Premiere Pro, you will
quickly notice how the simplification process has gone
hand in hand with the integration process. I'll give you
an idea of how just some of the new improvements would
work in a filmmaking realm.
After
you capture footage in Premiere Pro, you can assign
a huge amount of meta data to it using Adobe Bridge.
This meta data, which can be anything from copyright date,
to angle, to coloration, to green screen options, can
all be searched and saved in special, self-updating collections
for fast retrieval. (These options were originally released
as an image-only utility with Photoshop 7, but,
in the Production Studio-only version of Bridge,
you can assign all this information to your footage and
audio, as well as still images.) Once you've made it easy
on yourself to find any clips you need down the line,
you can drop them straight out of Bridge into your
bins in Premiere Pro (or After Effects or
Encore). Once you start editing with them, you
can create new title sequences in After Effects
and use the new Dynamic Link in Premiere Pro
to see these new After Effects creations in your timeline
without even having to render them in After Effects.
If you run into color problems in your film, Premiere
Pro is boasting seven new color correctors, including
a three-way color corrector and a secondary color corrector,
which is a very powerful feature for correcting colors
of highlights and secondarily-lit areas.
If
you run into some audio problems with your dialogue, you
can right click on your audio track and edit it in Audition.
Audition is now sporting an even more beefed up array
of touch-up abilities, which makes things even easier
to fix. Plus, since Audition supports DST plug-ins,
it's a snap to use third party Plug-ins like Bias Sound
Soap to provide additional clean up to your audio.
