If you’ve been reading MFM for any period of time, then you know that we’ve found Adobe to be perhaps the hardest working software company at specifically targeting the no-budget filmmaking community with amazingly powerful, professional tools. Unlike some other creators of editing software, Adobe seems intent on cramming as much bang for the buck into their Production Packages as they possibly can.
The CS4 release of Adobe’s Production Premium is no exception. Now, unlike CS3, there aren’t a slew of completely new products in CS4. Instead, all of the products have been unified, improved, and streamlined.
With Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia and SeriousMagic so shortly before CS3 was released, most of the additional content in CS3 (Flash, OnLocation, and Ultra) felt very disconnected from the look and feel of older Adobe products like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. Additionally, Adobe was launching a brand new audio program in Soundbooth, which looked a lot like the more traditional Adobe products, but didn’t have nearly as much depth due to its newness. Also, Adobe had just created Photoshop Extended, which reached out into both 3D and video uses, but which had very limited abilities in both of these areas. And, lastly, Adobe had decided to finally port Premiere Pro and the entire Production Premium package over to Intel Macs, but, because of the newness of the Serious Magic acquisition, neither Ultra nor OnLocation were natively compatible with the new platform. As such, the feeling of CS3 was that it was an amazing toolset that could do amazing things for an amazing price point, but everything was largely cobbled together and many things required strange workarounds, especially if you wanted to use the Serious Magic tools and were a Mac user.
Well, just over a year later, to everyone’s amazement, Adobe started shipping CS4. (Prior to the CS4 launch, the average time between massive releases from Adobe was about two years and most of us in the press were anticipating a Q3 ’09 release for CS4.) To our greater amazement, all of the cobbled together tools of CS3 had been refined and made to work seamlessly together, both in PC and Mac environments. (The only exception to this is in the area of Ultra, which vanished completely with the release of CS4. Adobe is supposed to be adding some of the functionality of Ultra in future versions of Production Premium. How that will be done remains to be seen.)
With that said, let’s break down the specifics of this massive package.
While nearly everything about CS4: Production Premium is essentially an improvement, the area of Ease of Use has received the greatest level of development, in my opinion. As Adobe made all of the software tie more easily together, it made swapping between programs much more seamless and intuitive. In CS4, Adobe has come closer than it ever has to creating a suite that behaves more like one gigantic program with smaller specialized nodes, rather than a series of loosely connected applications in a box.
One of the biggest areas this has occurred in has been in refining the Dynamic Link options between programs. Premiere Pro is now capable of sending video into After Effects, as well as using original AE projects via the Dynamic Link pipeline. Encore now allows you to bring unrendered Premiere Pro timelines directly into it and burn DVDs without wasting additional space on exported intermediate video files from Premiere Pro. Soundbooth allows you to import audio and can now create multi-layer audio files that can be used directly in Premiere Pro. Even Flash is starting to get in on the action with a brand new .EDL that After Effects can generate which allows .AE projects to be opened directly inside of Flash.
It’s hard to believe that so much could be accomplished in only one year!
