REVIEW: ADOBE CS3 PRODUCTION PREMIUM - PART I

Post by Daniel Restuccio and Brady Betzel CS3 Production PremiumCreative Suite 3 Production Premium is Adobe’s answer to the production and post production needs of video professionals. This suite of applications groups together - for both Intel-based Macs and Windows based PCs (including Vista) - Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, After Effects Professional, Premiere, Encore, Soundbooth, Bridge, Device Central, Dynamic Link and Flash Professional. Windows users also get On-Location and Ultra. Conceptually this release actualizes the next level of Adobe’s vision of transforming their software into a single dynamically-integrated system. This approach of organizing the individual applications into themed suites - design, Web, production and master collection - allows for the creation of a seamless workflow from idea to finished products within the Adobe family. Everyone experiences the synergistic benefits of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, noting that the parts are pretty fantastic in and of themselves. For our review we worked with the beta version of Production Premium and decided to wrangle HDV 29.97 footage from a Sony HVR-V1U. One big news item with this release is that Adobe ported Premiere Pro 2 to Mac Intel. So for these tests we ran Production Premium on a Mac Pro, Dual-Dual core 2.66 Xeon, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2, running Mac OS X 10.4.9. Capturing was straightforward using the preset Adobe HDV codec 1080i30 (60i). We put 20 layers of HDV footage in a timeline and could still preview in realtime with no “red bar/render selection† necessary. So “cuts only† projects are a breeze. We started stacking :15 clips on top of each other with 50 percent opacity and it played realtime up until the fourth clip. Then rendering those four clips took 40 seconds. So when you’re working on a project with transitions and effects, add some rendering time factored by the speed of your machine and its memory. read more...

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