Adobe’s CS4: Updating The Army Of Davids’ Toolkit
Adobe's long-running multimedia tools receive their latest facelift. But what's under the hood?
One by one, the media tools that the big boys in mainstream media had a monopoly on in the 20th century have fallen, thanks to powerful computers and the Web. In the past, a printing press and a fleet of delivery trucks required a serious capital investment. Today, anybody can launch a blog for free. A radio station was an even bigger investment; but Apple iTunes allows anyone to distribute their podcasts. A TV station is a bigger investment still–but anyone can upload a video to YouTube for free.
But while these media are often free for anyone to enter, the message delivered will likely suffer, without skill and fine tuning.
That’s where high-powered software such as Adobe’s CS4 platform comes into play. Adobe’s Creative Suite products, which include Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects and several others, have long powered numerous multimedia projects, ranging from Hollywood TV series to online videos. (Including my own Silicon Graffiti video series, familiar to many Pajamas readers.) This fall, all of the Creative Suite products received their latest facelift as part of Adobe’s CS4 line, so let’s take a look at a few of the new features in the programs that should most appeal to online multimedia mavens.
Premiere Pro CS4
First released in 1991, Adobe’s Premiere Pro serves as the timeline to assemble and edit raw video, still images manipulated in Photoshop, and add shots processed in After Effects or chromakey programs such as Adobe’s Ultra. (Which appears to be on hold or possibly discontinued–hopefully this powerful program will resurface inside a later edition of Creative Suite.)
Naturally, many sessions in Premiere Pro begin with importing video shot on camcorders. While DV and HDV cassettes have revolutionized video cameras, their one drawback has been the need to port their data into the computer in real time. In other words, if you’ve shot an hour of raw footage, after plugging the video camera into the PC, you’ll spend another hour of time waiting for the footage to be captured. While Premiere Pro CS4 still has a capture mode for tape-based camcorders (which after all, remain very much in circulation), it incorporates two newer methods to speed up the input process.
The first is the support of MTS files, the file format used in Sony’s hard disk-based HD-handycams. (A very popular format amongst renegade online TV networks, incidentally.) Simply plug in your Sony hard disk camcorder to your computer via USB; create a folder on your PC’s hard drive to hold the files you’ve recorded, and drag and drop them into the new folder. You can then import these files into CS4 and start editing.
While an increasing number of new camcorders use hard drives as their recording platform, the second new input feature of CS4 turns many older camcorders into de facto hard drive-based cameras. Adobe’s OnLocation CS4 (which, like Adobe’s Ultra, is also based on a program developed a few years ago by Serious Magic, which Adobe acquired in 2006) allows a camcorder to be plugged into a PC via FireWire and then to record directly to the computer’s hard disk.
Unless you’ve got an assistant running very close behind you with a laptop, OnLocation probably isn’t all that useful a program for run-and-gun location shooting. But for quickly getting a video shot in the studio (even if your studio is a basement or garage) up to YouTube, it’s tough to beat. It can also provide a better sense of how a shot will look on a computer monitor, as opposed to a camera’s viewfinder.
CS4 also integrates much greater support of Flash video. In the past to input Flash into Premiere Pro, it was necessary to convert the Flash video to a format compatible with Premiere to include it on the timeline. Otherwise, a third-party plug-in (such as those manufactured by Moyea Software was necessary. That’s no longer the case with CS4. Though I noticed an occasional frame dropout when rendering flash video on the Premiere Pro CS4 timeline, something I hadn’t seen when using the Moyea plug-in with CS2. This was random, and I was able to render, after a couple of tries, an acceptable looking video. Hopefully this will be looked into and corrected in an update to CS4.
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14 Comments
1. Instapundit » Blog Archive » ED DRISCOLL: Updating the Army of Davids’ Toolkit. Ed reviews the various Adobe Creative Suite…:[...] ED DRISCOLL: Updating the Army of Davids’ Toolkit. [...]
Dec 7, 2008 - 5:03 am 2. Anita:Apple’s freeware iPhoto, iMovie & OpenSource software GIMP would pretty much do enough to equal Adobe’s pricey sw.
Best.
Dec 7, 2008 - 5:30 am 3. Zimon:iPhoto and iMovie are not freeware. You are obliged to pay for it when you buy a new Mac or want to upgrade. The new versions of Windows Movie Maker, photo gallery and Paint.NET are free to anyone running Windows XP or Vista.
Dec 7, 2008 - 6:23 am 4. Screen Sleuth:Every version, these tools get bulkier and more unwieldy, not to mention more expensive. Adobe’s upgrade for their Reader 9 recently (which was a disaster and barely worked) cured my desire for any more Adobe “upgrades”.
Dec 7, 2008 - 7:44 am 5. Screen Sleuth:Adobe’s “upgrades” continue to get larger and bulkier, and is this one really worth the price tag assigned to it?
Dec 7, 2008 - 7:50 am 6. Scratch my back:Be honest: did Adobe give you a free evaluation copy?
Dec 7, 2008 - 8:14 am 7. Paddy O:I heartily recommend the Corel products as well. I’ve got CS2, and still use it, but have found myself increasingly opening Corel’s products more and more, especially for less complex tasks.
Their Painter series is, of course, always top notch, without comparison. But, now, I’ve really started appreciating their CorelDraw X4, which is a significantly cheaper alternative to Adobe’s design suite, with associated programs that make Photoshop and Illustrator mostly unneeded.
Corel has a really top-notch video program as well. I’m not done HD video with it yet, but it’s otherwise been extremely useful.
What I love about Corel is that they know they’re not market leaders, and so have made everything immensely user friendly and able to play well with others. They are much, more more intuitive and less menu driven. Instead of having purposeful lapses in working with other companies, they offer the ability to save or export in a massive amount of file formats.
To be sure, Adobe is better. But, for 95% of what needs to be done Corel is equally good, generally easier, and has other benefits, such as being significantly cheaper.
Corel deserves a little applause for their efforts.
Dec 7, 2008 - 10:10 am 8. Yehudit:There are tons of shareware and freeware – for Windows, Mac, and Linux – which include most of the features of these expensive expert tools. They are not implemented as beautifully, but if you are doing rough and ready guerilla multimedia you shouldn’t care. This is like buying a Ferrari to drive to the grocery store every week.
if you want to turn out a slick product, ok. But not only are the tools you’ve described going to run you $2000 total, they have a steep learning curve. Not to mention why you want to do fauxtography in the first place.
Anyway, the real action is in social software, which is free or pretty cheap. As in I got a good twitter client for my iphone for $3, and ok ones for free. And most of the web spaces are free. What counts is the communication and organization, not production values.
Dec 7, 2008 - 11:45 am 9. locomotivebreath1901:I too, agree with Paddy O’s comments on Corel. Much more intuitive the Adobe. Particularly, why anyone would use Illustrator over Draw is beyond me.
Now, I’ve never been a video guy, but After Effects CS4 sounds promising. Viral video just got more interesting.
As for photoshop, I only know enough to be dangerous, but I’m sure the media boys n girls will have fun w/ the added bells & whistles manufacturing more ‘news’!
TY EBD, Jr for the review.
Dec 7, 2008 - 9:00 pm 10. bobdog:I fundamentally disagree with Adobe that Acrobat Professional is worth $500.00 and is so bloated it requires a DVD or multiple CD’s to install it.
I also disagree that a program as obtuse and complex as Photoshop is somehow worth $800.00.
Dec 8, 2008 - 12:43 am 11. Mike:In my experience the only thing Adobe has going for it is Dreamweaver which they bought from another company. Their new stuff is over priced to the point that, for me at least, it is just not worth the cost. Dreamweaver 8 is as far as I am willing to go with them. And yeah, like others have pointed out, there are lots of freeware and lower cost alternatives out there.
Dec 8, 2008 - 1:41 am 12. Dave in Texas:———————————————
By the way, I hope all you rich liberals out there are going to pay a bunch of taxes because Joe Biden said it’s your patriotic duty to do so and I am waiting for my share of the free stuff Obama promised me.
Apple’s suite, Final Cut Studio, is as good as or better than Adobe, with the added benefit that Macs don’t usually crash and burn every ten minutes and have almost no viruses and malware written for them… they run for weeks without getting slower, they are simpler to use and do the tech stuff on.. they even defrag automatically without even asking them to.
I have become a Mac guy over the past two years… once you go Mac, etc.
And I agree with the article’s premise.. I now have the tools to produce a major motion picture, all for a few hundred bucks and the right computer. Of course it’s about lighting and expensive cameras and actors and all that, but without any of those I can still produce what looks like a quality television show… amazing stuff, in such a short time.
Dec 9, 2008 - 8:48 am 13. Ratatosk:If there was a competitor for Flash, Adobe would be in serious trouble.
Dec 10, 2008 - 12:04 pm 14. Kirk Turner:Professionals use Adobe’s Creative Suite or Madcap products; they are well worth the price if you understand the software and can make use of all its components. In addition,they produce web and print documents that are far superior than cheap shareware or freeware software programs. If you don’t use software often and want freeware or shareware programs – that’s different. I produce printed and web documents for a living, and wouldn’t be caught dead using most of the programs listed above, Corel being the exeption. But then again, I have to produce first-rate products, or my reputation is finished.
Dec 12, 2008 - 6:01 am