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MillimeterEdit Expertise: Suite News
Sep 23, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer and Franklin McMahon
A sneak preview of the wide-ranging new Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium (CS4).
Adobe Soundbooth has received a dramatic overhaul in CS4. Now you can perform multitrack editing and score music and audio to a video clip.
BY FRANKLIN MCMAHON
Adobe has always introduced lots of small updates in each of its CS upgrades. To me, however, CS4 is one of Adobe's biggest and most ambitious upgrades ever.
Dynamic Link is one area that Adobe works very hard to improve with each suite release. The concept is to link and move projects from one program to the other, without having to re-render — no easy feat when you consider the complexity of workflow. In CS4, for example, you can move a Premiere Pro project into After Effects (AE), where it resides as a single layer. Make a change in Premiere Pro, and switch over to AE to see it automatically updated — with no rendering. Move a Premiere Pro project into Encore, and changes are instantly updated in Encore. Move AE and Premiere Pro projects into Soundbooth, and see changes update in realtime.
In fact, Soundbooth now features a format called Adobe Sound Document (ASND); it's basically a container that holds your audio project and all your audio files in one file, making it easy to bring audio work into Flash, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.
Modes transfer from program to program as well. Create a 3D model in Photoshop CS4 Extended in 3D layer mode, and then move it directly over to After Effects — where you still have complete 3D control to move and animate your objects in your AE composition. It's a little hard to see the advantages until you are immersed in a large multiprogram project. Only then can you experience how the lack of rendering can save literally hours of production time.
Interplay between Flash Professional and After Effects has been improved via layered files as well. Bring your AE composition into Flash, and then easily add interactivity. You might be wondering what Flash is doing in the Production suite. Adobe isn't wondering; the company knows that deploying animations and presentations go well beyond video and into web deployment and delivery to portable devices such as mobile phones. Adobe has also made Flash, dare I say, easy to use this time around. But we'll get to that in a minute.
Premiere Pro CS4 has more than 50 new improvements, many of which are workflow shortcuts to make editing faster and more efficient. For example, you can copy/paste transitions; retrain settings such as duration; snap keyframes to other events in your timeline; drag and drop to create new subclips; and use expanded timecode display options, including a timecode filter effect for one-step burning onto your video. You now can combine a series of effects into a single preset and sprinkle the new combo across your timeline. This saves huge amount of time because you can now tweak one clip — say, speed, video/audio levels, color, etc. — and then combine all those parameters into one preset and quickly apply them to all your other clips. Or save the combo preset for use in another project.
Tapeless support is extended for CS4. You can import and natively edit with no transcoding (or file wrapping) DVCPRO, DVCPRO HD, and AVCHD formats. Now you also can edit directly from a P2 card, either from a card residing in the camera or in a card reader.
After Effects CS4 is also packed with lots of new features. Perform a global search to find effects and project elements much more easily. After Effects projects can get extremely complex very quickly, so this cuts down on the need to twirl layers open to find stuff. Speaking of finding things, one of AE's coolest new features is a nested-comp navigation. Many users, including me, take advantage of AE's ability to create a composition and place it inside another composition. Nesting and subnesting can get complex, but AE has a new mini-flowchart on the top of the comp window that allows you to see nests and how they relate to the structure of your composition.
Along the top of the main Adobe After Effects CS4 interface is the mini-flowchart pop-up that tracks your nested compositions.
A new cartoon-effect filter is included with AE CS4. This comprehensive effect can take the place of time-consuming frame-by-frame rotoscoping, offering a range of professional parameters to tweak. As mentioned, AE allows the import of 3D layers from Photoshop Extended, so the program now includes more 3D tools — including a unified camera tool that works with a three-button mouse for quick camera, orbit, and axis positioning. Also included is a standalone 2.5D planar motion-tracking program from Imagineer Systems called mocha. Mocha has not yet been given the familiar CS4 workspace redesign, but it does an amazing job of motion-tracking on difficult footage — clips lacking detail and those with grain and objects moving out of screen. It's amazingly powerful and a welcome addition to the compositing toolset.
Photoshop CS4 Extended takes 3D editing and compositing to new levels. What appeared in CS3 as a basic but usable 3D toolset has blossomed to include advanced 3D paint, 2D-image-to-3D conversion, advanced wrapping (including video clip layers), and a new high-quality raytracer. Add to this the Photoshop CS4 Extended animation timeline, with keyframable positions of objects and camera as well as render parameters, and you've got a beefy animation system with 3D capabilities that brings compositing power to any Photoshop user.
Also new in Photoshop are live, non-destructive corrections via the adjustments panel, improved naturalism for dodge and burn, better auto-align and auto-blend, more advanced depth-of-field automation, and GPU-powered zoom and pan with (finally) none of the blurry pixel averaging found in previous releases. Also a new feature that can only be described as magic: content-aware scaling. Imagine a 640×480 photo of four people sitting on a short wall. You need the picture to be 1280×480 for an HD project. You merely apply content-aware scaling and drag the corner, and the vista is expanded. The people are now spaced out, as is the background. It looks like an untouched image with no stretching. You have to see this in action; I don't know how Adobe does it. The possibilities for this tool are endless.
Soundbooth CS4 has received probably the most dramatic overhaul. In CS3, it was a basic audio-tweaking program with some good automated features (see digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/revfeat/adobe_soundbooth_cs). The CS4 version is a full-featured multitrack scoring and editing tool that finally gives Audition a run for the money. (Audition is now available separately and not as part of any suite — not always a good sign for program longevity.) The new ASND format allows easy project saving. Automatic volume matching allows each track to be limited to make its levels even with those of all the rest. MP3 compression preview lets you hear your file before you render it. Compressed and royalty-free Soundbooth Scores (some included, more to be purchased online) ensure that you will always have tweakable production music at your disposal.
Adobe OnLocation was added late in the game to Windows versions of CS3, with its non-standard interface. It now has the CS4 interface, and it's available to Mac users. OnLocation does one thing really well: It allows you to capture video directly to your hard drive from you camera, bypassing tape and even card-based solutions. It's a handy production tool that can be used alone or as a backup when you're also shooting to tape.
And then there is Flash CS4 Professional. If you're a video producer who so far has stayed clear of the program (and who could blame you?), it's time to take a look. Animation in Flash has always been a complex mish-mash of symbol creation and keyframe tweens that left After Effects users and traditional desktop animation creators scratching their heads. Now the animation workflow is based on object-based keyframes. Make a keyframe, move object, make another keyframe, hit play. Repeat. Yes, folks, it only took a decade, but now you can use Flash to animate just like you do in every other program on the planet. Somewhere, techy Flash propellerheads are getting very nervous that traditional animators and media artists will now be diving into Flash for their clients. Oh, and Flash now features 3D transformations (without scripting), inverse kinematics, bones, and a motion-editor panel with attribute curves. It's not After Effects, but it finally works for me.
It's impossible to cover every program and feature in this overview, but without a doubt, CS4's countless new features and workflow improvements add up to one of the biggest and more exciting suite updates in Adobe's history. This might be the release that gets you experimenting with cross-program workflow and diving into programs and features (Flash, Soundbooth, OnLocation, and 3D animation in Photoshop) that have escaped your focus until now.
To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer editorial staff at feedback@digitalcontentproducer.com.
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