Depth of Options
The main draw for Studio 8 is that it gives you the web design gold standard, Dreamweaver 8, and the rich media gold standard, Flash Professional 8. Additionally, the package also includes the decidedly quirky graphics hybrid, Fireworks 8, which has been re-designed to include more of the vector-based tools found in Freehand MX from Studio MX. (Consequently, Freehand MX is no longer part of the suite and integration between Adobe and Macromedia hasn’t progressed to the point where you get Photoshop and Illustrator instead of Fireworks.) Along for the ride are PDF generator Flashpaper 2 and extended web site manager Contribute 3, both of which help larger companies communicate between designers and editors.
Since the main attraction are Dreamweaver 8 and Flash Professional 8, we’ll specifically look at the options that are new in those programs.
Dreamweaver 8 has a number of new features and a number of improvements over it’s predecessor. Two nice new features, that seems to have been borrowed from Photoshop, are the inclusion of Zoom control and Guide lines. Zoom control will allow you to zoom in and out of your page to check alignment and graphical issues at the pixel basis, while Guide lines will allow you to layout the page more easily. Another great feature is the ability to set up different workspace layouts and save them, which you may recall was later implemented in Adobe’s Production Suite. (This choice was actually decided by the two companies separately, before Adobe acquired Macromedia.)
A feature that I quite like is the new “Paste Special” option, which will allow you to paste up to four levels of information when you copy and paste text from word processors. You can choose to paste just the text all the way up to pasting the text, formatting, size, and font (which, of course, utilizes CSS to accomplish). This is very cool, although it only works with newer versions of Word and WordPerfect, so users who haven’t upgraded won’t have access to most of the benefits of this.
To make the program a little less scary for neophytes, Macromedia has included a variety of template-based starter pages to get newbies up and started quickly. The pages actually look quite nice and are a pleasant touch for experienced designers who might want to use a decent template for non-signature sites.
The improvements Dreamweaver 8 is sporting are largely in the areas of Flash video inclusion, PHP 5 support, and improved graphical interface for XML and XSLT. While the last two are not going to be areas where most filmmakers are going to need to go, the first is a definite help. It basically streamlines how you can import Flash video and the controls to run it in the web page you are creating. This removes a few extra steps to this process and is quite nice.
With that said, let’s move on to Flash.
For uploading clips of your films or making Flash-enabled trailers, Flash Professional 8 and Flash Player 8 provide support for the new, higher resolution codec, VP6, which was developed by On2 Technologies. The older codec, Spark from Sorenson, is still supported, as well.
To test this new codec and encoder, we imported a 13 second MPEG-1 clip with the top resolution set up for first VP6 and, then subsequently, Spark. VP6 was actually about three times slower than Spark to initially encode, taking about 45 seconds to encode vs. 15 seconds for Spark. However, once the encoding was done, the results spoke for themselves on behalf of VP6. It’s gorgeous!
You especially notice the difference in sections where a lot of motion is happening at once, where Spark has tendency to pixelate, whereas VP6 stays tight and pristine. (Look at the accompanying picture to see what I mean.)
Now, how about the size difference? Well, Spark-compressed video was smaller, but not by much. For the aforementioned 13 second clip, we were at 1.28 MB with Spark and 1.30 MB for VP6. That brings it out to about 6 MB per minute with VP6 vs. 5.9 MB per minute with Spark. A negligible size difference for a big boost in quality! Hats off to Macromedia and On2 for this great looking codec.
Additionally, the integration of different Flash player and skin options into the video import wizard really simplifies your life. The controls on the Flash video players are still a bit rougher than I would like, but they work quite nicely for most video display purposes. (By “rough,” I mean that it’s fairly difficult to navigate to very specific parts of a Flash video. You can easily get to a general region in clip, but you don’t have fine scrub functionality. Maybe in a future version.)
For helping you get more attention on the web, Flash Professional 8 now has the ability to use meta-tags in different pages of your Flash site, allowing them to be crawled by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com.
Additionally, you can now apply a variety of Photoshop-like Blending effects on your layers and filters like Blur, Drop Shadow, and Glow to your objects, which really helps when it comes to creativity of design vs. file size. (Of course, these new features do require Flash Player 8 for viewers to be able to see all these helpful little touches.) Additionally, there’s now a mobile emulator that will allow you to design and preview Flash files that are designed to be distributed to things like mobile phones, handheld PDAs, and portable gaming systems, such as the Sony PSP.
