Software
Review: Adobe Production
Studio Premium, Pg. 5
Photoshop
CS2
Increased vector based support allows a fair number
of Illustrator functions to be handled in Photoshop,
which helps decrease the amount bouncing between the
two programs you have to do. Additionally, many Photoshop
filters are now able to be more readily shared between
it and After Effects and Illustrator.
The
new Perspective Tools in Photoshop really give
you powerful ways of creating continuing backgrounds,
which are especially useful for replacement backgrounds
for video. Somewhat related to the perspective tool,
the new 'Warp' Tool will allow you to warp pictures
and designs onto curved and abnormal surfaces, which
can be a great way to apply tattoos to flesh or logos
to cars.
Finally,
you can now use custom pixel shapes so that you can
edit in wide screen and other pixel shifted formats
as they will appear in the final films without guessing
about 'squeeze' issues. (For a more thorough review
of Photoshop CS2, be sure and check
out our stand-alone review of it in this issue by clicking
here.)
Illustrator
CS2
A new control pallette has been added to Illustrator
which really makes working the program much easier,
as it displays most of the options for any tool you
are using without requiring you to rummage through a
bunch of nested menus. LivePaint allows you to 'paint'
within Illustrator, changing line weights and
fills on the fly, yet the program maps out all the vector
nodes as you do so, to give you complete control of
touching it up after the fact. This can be a great way
to create original animations that can then be exported
into your films or into Flash animations. As mentioned
before, LiveTrace is a very cool way to create custom
animations by allowing Illustrator to vector-trace your
rasterized video images and then having them be batch-applied
to your footage. (For a more complete review of Illustrator
CS2, be sure and check out our upcoming Illustrator
review in the May 15th issue.)
Bridge
This allows you to keep track of all your video, audio,
and still images. You can apply XML meta-data which
allows you to Boolean search through your clips and
will also allow you to preview and rate clips in the
Bridge area. You can also activate batch processes from
other programs, like Illustrator, using the Bridge.
Performance
The only small performance issue I have is that, despite
the fact that After Effects' Dynamic Link is a
great improvement, it's still very dependent on processor
and RAM power. As such, even if you render it in Premiere
Pro, you tend to notice some jumpiness until you do
a final render and export. This can be remedied with enough
CPU speed and RAM, but it would still be something nice
to see polished in APSP 1.5 or 2. (Even with this
caveat, After Effects 7 Professional and it's Dynamic
Link are nowhere near the CPU, memory, or video card hog
that FCP Studio's Motion 2 is!)
