First Look: Adobe Creative Suite 4

DV By Oliver Peters

Hot on the heals of last year’s huge Adobe software release, the company has quickly turned around another batch of impressive updates in its new Creative Suite 4 line-up. Once again, these products can be purchased individually or as part of various collections for Web, video and print. Plus the all-in-one Master Collection. All CS4 products will ship by the end of Q4 2008.

I’ll focus my comments on Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium — the collection for video professionals. Its main applications include Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Encore, OnLocation and Soundbooth. In addition, there are also other utilities designed to aid your workflow, such as Bridge, Device Central, Dynamic Link and Adobe Media Encoder.

Common Feature Enhancements
Across the board, Adobe has concentrated on several big improvements and additions between CS3 and CS4. These include user interface changes, searchable metadata based on XMP support and speech-to-text technology. The user interfaces of the various applications continue to move closer to a common Adobe layout. This tabbed workspace design is most completely implemented in Premiere Pro, After Effects and Soundbooth. Most of the applications have gained search fields that operate like Apple’s Spotlight. Typing information into the search field of a Premiere Pro bin will filter the displayed contents to match your criteria. In After Effects, for example, you can filter timeline layers to only display tracks where the object’s position has been altered, simply by typing “position” into the search field. Most of the applications have been metadata-enabled so meaningful descriptions, titles, keywords and copyright information can be captured and embedded into files using open source XMP technology. read more...