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Integrate Review—ADS Technologies Pyro Professional

Dec 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Tom Patrick McAuliffe

FireWire board anchors strong Adobe bundle.

Synergy requires that a whole be greater than the simple sum of its parts. To create the Pyro Professional bundle, ADS Technologies took one part hardware (one of the most popular IEEE 1394 boards on the market), added three parts software (the best of Adobe's audio/video applications), and the result is an effective, professional production package for the PC. Pyro Professional includes the Pyro 1394 PCI card as well as Adobe Premiere Pro, Audition 1.0, and Encore DVD 1.0.

Complete with a 1394 I/O board, ADS Pyro Professional is one of the most cost-effective DV-editing and DVD-authoring packages on the market today.

ADS has a history of providing cost-effective video production solutions that aspire to the professional level. Though ADS does not write software itself, the company has been able to put together popular bundles through strategic partnering. The latest incarnation of the ADS NLE bundle is now available as Pyro Professional. The first ADS FireWire bundle included Ulead Media Studio Pro, Hash Animation:Master, Sony Sound Forge XP, and Pixelan Spice Rack and was sold as ADS Pyro Pro. Next was a FireWire card with the full version of Adobe Premiere 6.0, sold as ADS Pyro Pro Platinum. Some users must have purchased it just to get the full version of Premiere 6.0/6.5 at such a low price point.

While Pyro Professional may be short on innovation, it is long on value. What's special about past bundles from ADS remains special for the Professional bundle — the price! Somehow, to the benefit of all video pros worldwide, ADS manages to put its hardware together with third-party software and create video-editing bundles that cost considerably less than purchasing each software package individually.

The ADS FireWire card works, but is there anything special about it? Not really. It does include both four- and six-pin IEEE 1394 connections, which is nice. But for less than $500 street in many cases, this new product bundle includes Premiere Pro for video editing, Encore DVD for DVD authoring, and Audition for loop-based music creation and audio mixing, editing, and effects processing. (For a review of Premiere Pro, see November Video Systems. For an Encore DVD review, see the October issue. And for a review of Audition, see p. 37 of this issue.)

This review will not be a complete analysis of Adobe's three recent products, of course. But because ADS bundles them together, I will examine how well the applications are integrated.

For this review, I tested ADS Pyro Professional on a PC running Windows XP Pro with a 2GHz Pentium IV CPU and 512MB of RAM. For DVD burning I used HP's DVD-200i DVD+R/RW burner. Installation of the three software packages was straightforward and without problems. ADS does not provide any drivers for the 1394 I/O board and instead lets Windows handle that. Fortunately, XP has a solid DV driver. IRQ hassles are a thing of the past.

My goal was to take some raw DV footage, edit it, sweeten the audio, and record it all to DVD. But there were some challenges, as might be expected when trying to get multiple programs to work together. You can use all three software packages to streamline your workflow, but productivity gains seem to be more by accident than by design. Video is captured in Premiere Pro and placed on the timeline. You can clean up a voiceover track in Audition and create your own background music. When your project is done, export it from Premiere Pro as an MPEG-2 file that can be loaded into Encore DVD.

Once I had digitized my footage to the hard drive via Premiere, I took the audio into Audition as a WAV file for sweetening. As a loop-based music creation tool, Audition includes thousands of sound samples to get you started, but they're all in CEL format. So to use any of the included sound files in Premiere or Encore, you must first open them in Audition and save them in a format that Premiere can open, such as WAV.

If I had one wish both for the whole bundle, it would be better consistency in the handling of audio files within Premiere Pro and Audition. Currently it's harder to change the audio length in Audition's multi-track than in Premiere Pro!

Once I'd sweetened the audio I imported it back into Premiere and edited the video to match the audio track. I then exported the project as an MPEG-2 file.

I started up Encore DVD and found that it automatically changes files into the MPEG-2 format as required for DVD. Transcoding data into a DVD-compatible format — whether it starts as AVI, MP3, or WAV — was a breeze.

What causes trouble in Encore DVD is its menu-creation function. Though Adobe includes some pre-built menus, there are simply not enough. If I had to choose an enhancement to Pyro Professional that would bolster Encore DVD's functionality, it would be to include Photoshop LE in the bundle. Users need to be able to create and edit custom DVD menus, so an image-editing program of some type is a necessity. Once I created all my menus and sub-menus, I burned a DVD that played back on all but the oldest DVD players.

Though the three programs are not fine-tuned to work together, files are easily transferred between the programs. If you have enough RAM (and you should always max out your computer's RAM), you can have all three applications running simultaneously. That is a good incentive for setting up a dual RGB monitor system.

Despite any shortcomings individually or when taken as a whole, the 1394 board and software applications add up to a mighty combination. Each application in the software bundle is powerful on its own, and the low price that ADS offers makes it all the more enticing. One other nice touch is the included Video Workshop DVD, a great quick-start tool that lets you skim all of the included software with examples, tutorials, and sample projects.

I would recommend this product for beginning video professionals and even for seasoned pros wanting to add a second edit system. It's the most cost-effective way to get pro-level applications on your computer. If you've got a good DV camera, a fast PC, and want to roll to DVD, the ADS Pyro Professional bundle will light your postproduction fire.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: ADS Technologies Cerritos, Calif.; (800) 888-5244
www.adstech.com

Product: Pyro Professional

Assets: Includes full versions of Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD, and Adobe Audition for Windows; Pyro 1394 PCI card features both four- and six-pin connections; low price compared to the applications' separate purchase prices.

Caveats: The three Adobe applications are not yet optimized to work together.

Demographic: Beginning video professionals and those considering a second PC edit system.

Price: About $499 street

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.