Why not subscribe now?
Useful Link(s)...
Hosting by
Bluehost
January 2006
David Em davidem@earthlink.net
www.davidem.com
Copyright 2006 David Em.
Adobe's (http://www.adobe.com) new Production Studio suite brings an astonishing array of pro-quality video tools to the PC desktop. There's a $1,199 Standard and a $1,699 Premium bundle configuration, as well as a $2,099 Video Bundle that includes Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Video Professional.
I tested the Premium edition that includes Premiere Pro 2 for video editing, Audition 2 for audio editing, After Effects 7 for video post-production, Encore DVD 2 for DVD authoring, plus Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2. After Effects 7, Photoshop CS 2, and Illustrator CS 2 work on both Mac and PC. The others are PC-only.
All these applications, with the exception of Photoshop and Illustrator, have been significantly upgraded with a slew of new features and a unified interface. A new Dynamic Link feature and universal integration of the Adobe Bridge media browser radically streamlines the interoperability between the individual programs, in essence converting the package into a multimedia "metaprogram."
For the first time, Adobe's managed to create a truly unified interface across a product suite. They've attempted it before with their CS line of 2D and web graphics apps, but each of the programs in that bundle still has idiosyncratic legacy interface elements.
Where Premiere has been developed in-house by Adobe for years, programs like After Effects and Audition were acquired from other developers, and so have had radically different looks and feels from other products in Adobe's lineup. Their interfaces have been retooled and unified in Production Studio, and the result is a giant step in the right direction.
The new interface paradigm is customizable. You can adjust the UI's overall brightness, a prerequisite for viewing video colors properly. Program elements can now be organized as tabbed palettes that can be grouped together or displayed individually. When expanded into interface panels, they can be resized, rearranged, and docked, radically reducing screen clutter. Once you've created an individualized workspace for a particular workflow, you can save it for future reference.
Adobe Bridge, a file management browser that first appeared in Adobe's Creative Suite, has been incorporated into the entire Production Studio, making it a snap to view or import any file type supported by Adobe as well as organize collections of media. Bridge employs XMP metadata to embed searchable information into files.
The programs in the Production Studio can access 3GB of RAM per app, making them considerably more capable than previous versions that topped out at about 1GB. The extra headroom takes advantage of the Dynamic Link's ability to move After Effects compositions directly into Premiere or Encore DVD, a process that also eliminates the need to pre-render compositions as AVI or Quicktime files, saving time, CPU cycles, and disk storage. The linked files are also updated automatically, a huge productivity boon on the creative side.
Premiere Pro 2 is a world-class desktop video editor that competes head to head with Apple's FinalCut Pro. In addition to working with a wide variety of formats from DV all the way up to uncompressed HD, it also has very capable audio, titling, and effects tools built in.
Premier Pro 2's deep compatibility with After Effects 7 takes it to another level. Projects can be exported and imported into both programs with markers, keyframes, transitions, and other elements intact. You can apply an effect in one program and render it in the other.
I'm very impressed with Premiere Pro 2's color corrector, which processes color with 32-bit resolution regardless of the bit-depth of the source data, making for much smoother color and tone transitions. You can adjust color with the one-touch Fast corrector or make very fine Secondary corrections with a variety of tools that not too long ago would have cost thousands of dollars all on their own.
A great new feature is the ability to cut between four camera sources. A quad-view monitor displays four synced sources and a preview of the switcher output, which can be recorded in real time and then polished with standard editing tools. Another workflow addition is Clip Notes, which use PDF files to embed comments or feedback into project files. Clip Notes, which appear as markers in the timeline, add timecode references to comments and can have password protected text. You can jump to specific notes, edit them, and export them to team members or clients as PDF files that can be roundtripped back into an editing project.
Premiere Pro 2 uses a combination of a system's CPU and GPU card to render files. I was able to stack up several layers of DV, audio, and still image layers with nary a hiccup on the dual Opteron 252 workstation we built a while back. Used in conjunction with AJA's (http://www.aja.com) Xena HS real time encoding card, you can capture, edit, and output SD and HD material. A good workstation such as our Opteron system, which has an NVIDIA Quadro 4400 graphics card, can edit HDV source material. Flash video export is also now supported.
A quick rundown of other significant new features includes creating DVDs directly off the timeline, editable Effects keyframe parameter graphs, import and export of AAF and EDL editing files, and support for 10-bit video and 16-bit PSD files in resolutions of up to 4096 x 4096.
After Effects has been the standard in desktop video post production since it was introduced around fifteen years ago. Over time it's progressed from "The Little Compositor that Could" to a full-featured 3D layer effects program that rivals systems that once cost hundreds of thousands dollars.
If there's one program in Adobe's stable that's desperately needed a major interface overhaul, it's After Effects. After Effects is much-loved in the video community, but working with it can be painful due to its cluttered workspace made up of multiple overlapping windows, floating palettes, and lots and lots of teeny tiny text.
The Production Studio's new interface design goes a long way to reducing screen clutter. Like 3D animation programs, video post apps are very complex and typically require a lot of windows to be open simultaneously. To keep it under control, I usually use three screens to spread all the elements out on (typically one for output, one for the layered timeline, and one for everything else).
The new interface corrals all the floating UI elements and locks them down. The whole experience feels a lot more solid. Unfortunately, the need to read zillions of tiny text elements and icons remains. The solution to this problem's been worked out by Discreet's (http://www.discreet.com) line of video post products, which are context-sensitive, only displaying the UI elements you need at the moment.
After Effects 7 takes another swipe at the big dogs of the video post world with 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support (Professional edition only) for compositing in 32-bit-per channel floating-point color.
The Professional edition also has a Timewarp tool that uses motion vectors make video footage move faster or slower. There are other tools that do this by simply adding, subtracting, or averaging frames, which can produce jumpy results. Instead, Timewarp analyzes individual pixels on a frame-by-frame basis to interpolates motion information, and the results are markedly superior. The smoother you program the motion, the greater the processing hit, but the result's worth it.
After Effects 7 uses OpenGL 2 hardware to render many effects in real time, much of which is good enough for final output. There's also a bounty of animation presets for text and effects that can be previewed and applied directly from Adobe Bridge.
Audition 2 records, precisely edits, and outputs 32-bit audio. This version will give any audio app on the market a run for its money.
There are two views you can work in, one to edit files, and a Multitrack View that displays an unlimited number of tracks and records up to eighty simultaneous live inputs with hardware support from companies such as Mackie (http://www.mackie.com).
Editing audio in Audition is a very visual experience. The program employs a variety of visual representations of audio data such as the Spectral Frequency Display that makes it easy to identify and analyze anomalies or noise in a sound file.
I really like the Lasso tool you can use in conjunction with the visual analysis tools to select and isolate frequencies, thereby limiting the application of repair algorithms only to the selected area, similar to how a mask works in Photoshop.
A new Mastering Rack lets you preview multiple effects simultaneously, and you can punch live into tracks in real time. Virtually everything in the program provides instant feedback.
Premiere 2 supports ASIO (Audio Streaming Input/Output) drivers that are compatible with a host of pro hardware products that let you monitor audio in record mode as well as volume, pan, and effects in playback mode. The program also comes with thousands of royalty-free 32-bit music loops.
Encore DVD 2, the DVD authoring component of Production Studio, is a huge advance over the previous version, which I truly hated. This iteration is much more straightforward. A new Flowchart panel makes it easy to get an overview of your production, keep track of how all the project elements link together, and drag and drop navigation link connections.
The whole Encore workflow is much more automated, with good Photoshop integration for creating and editing images. Slideshows are now easy to organize and produce, and chapter menus and markers are easy to create.
A variety of royalty-free menus, templates, and other assets come for-free with the program. I haven't put together a complex DVD project with Encore DVD 2 yet, but from a First Look perspective, it looks quite capable of painlessly authoring DVDs.
When I first tested a pre-release version of Production Studio a few months ago, I was surprised to learn it's not 64-bit compliant. Video production is one discipline that will benefit enormously from the much greater RAM access possible with 64-bit apps, but despite the fact we've now had both 64-bit hardware and Windows XP 64 available for a year, there's till precious little software that takes advantage of it.
Nevertheless, with its remarkably deep and interoperable feature set, this new version of the Adobe Production studio bundle is one of the great software deals of all time.