Adobe Creative Suite 5 First Look

Millimeter by Jan Ozer

Today, Adobe revealed Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Like many members of the press, I've been working with beta software for about three months, and I am very familiar with the additions to Premiere Pro, OnLocation, Media Encoder, and a couple of ancillary programs, which I'll detail here. For information about After Effects, Photoshop, or other programs in the suite, you'll have to look elsewhere.

At a high level, the improvements to this corner of the suite concentrate in two areas: performance and metadata. Let's talk performance first. Since the Apple iPad shipped about two weeks ago, there's been a general surfeit of glowing adjectives on the Internet and in print, and we've all become somewhat immune to terms such as "amazing," "fantastic," and "astounding" (let's call it the "iPad effect"). So I'll be objective and descriptive, rather than literary.