Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 90) review Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium By Tim Siglin For professional video editors and for streaming media content creators, there is now a new choice in editing and encoding software to be considered. Premiere Pro makes a fine debut on the Mac and a solid upgrade on the Windows platform, thanks in no small part to the continued integration between the bevy of Adobe CS3 programs. The whole suite of tools, especially Adobe Media Encoder, is highly recommended. Price: $1,699 For More Information, Contact: Adobe Systems, Inc. www.adobe.com Adobe, like Apple and Microsoft, has found that the power of the software suite both makes financial sense and increases customer satisfaction (and, cynics would say, locks customers down to a particular company). Earlier this year, Adobe released several bundles of its new Creative Suite 3 products. The Design bundle combines print and design tools, the Web bundle groups web applications, and the Production bundle groups video production and delivery tools. For Streaming Media readers, Adobe Production Premium CS3 holds significant promise for creating quality content and streamlining workflow. Adobe lumps its video editing and encoding tools, along with key design and web tools, under the Dynamic Media umbrella. This naming is Adobe’s nod to the fact 90 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 that the tools it formerly segmented as print, web, and video are now often interchangeable. The practical benefit to Adobe’s move toward this dynamic media worldview is that the Production Premium CS3 bundle comes with more than just video editing and compositing tools: More than 15 products are part of the bundle, including Flash Pro CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3, and two Windows-only applications—On Location and Ultra—that came out of the Serious Magic acquisition. The last two tools aren’t quite as seamlessly integrated into the total CS3 bundle; in fact, On Location is a just slightly reskinned version of Serious Magic’s DV Rack 2.0. But the tools are powerful enough to bear mentioning as Adobe’s foray into the acquisition side of the production process: Ultra is a very fine chromakeying tool that earned Serious Magic significant critical acclaim because it ran on a standard desktop machine; On Location is a tool that provides digital equivalents of the waveform monitor, vectorscope, and other hardware we used to drag around on location to make sure our field shots matched our studio shots. The added feature of On Location’s being able to capture video directly to a laptop hard drive—and its ability to run on both Windows-based laptops and via Boot Camp on Apple laptops—makes it an essential tool for capturing and rapidly reviewing DV- and HDV- content in the field. The best tools in the bundle are the ones that are footnoted beneath their better-known siblings. These tools include Dynamic Link and Bridge, which provide crossprogram media linking and centralized asset management, respectively; Device Central, which contains hundreds of profiles for mobile devices to show how particular content will play back on each; Acrobat Connect, for collaboration across machines; and my personal favorite, the Adobe Media Encoder. The integration between any of the key programs (including Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects, and Photoshop) and the Adobe Media Encoder is of particular interest to streaming media content creators. We’ll spend the rest of this article looking briefly at these programs and reviewing their integration with Media Encoder. Premiere Pro CS3 Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is a “back to basics” update to one of the oldest video editing tools; I remember my first editing job on Premiere shortly after graduating from college back in 1992, slogging through multiple renders just to see whether a simple cross-fade transition would work. Yet the program was inexpensive (compared to Avid solutions) and always held the promise that it could be a http://www.adobe.com
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