A Designer’s Random Thoughts on the Adobe CS3 Launch
You would have to be living under a rock not to have caught yesterday’s massive roll out of Adobe’s revised product line, with a wide range of software now falling under the “Creative Suite” monkier. My “day job” as it were, is as a motion graphics designer, designing content primarily for television, although I do have an interest in other aspects too such as print. As someone who’s job depends on Adobe’s products, I found a lot of interesting things in yesterdays rollout. Before I begin though I have to say; hats off to Adobe. I have given them a hard time on this blog before, but the new creative suite is massive and must have taken a tremendous effort to deliver that many product updates while transitioning to a new platform at the same time. They certainly deserve kudos for that. So without further ado, and in no particular order here are some details about the various releases you might find interesting.
Premier Pro has finally made it to the Mac. I know a lot of people will probably think: “meh, so what”. It does however offer the designer several useful tools, most notably it’s integration with after effects, which seems particularly tight, and far better than Apple’s somewhat clunky round tripping to motion. If you are primarily a final cut user, you might find that having premier pro in your arsenal is a useful addition to your tool set and a potential go between after effects and FCP. I assume Premiere has some form of XML import, so you could import a project from FCP then send it to After Effects. It’s certainly worth considering
The Encore DVD Authoring, also new to the Mac platform again looks interesting from the point of view of After Effects integration, although I am quite happy with the way DVD studio Pro works. Blu-Ray support is good, but I expect the next version of DVD Studio Pro will have that also. Having said that, there are two features of Encore that look really cool. The first is Flash output, and the second is it’s encoding software. Encore now has the ability to export your entire dvd project to flash, encoding the video, menus and everything into a flash file that you can put on a website. This is a great tool for dvd designers wanting to give remote clients a way to proof their projects, or even just for web designers to design interactive, rich web content without relative ease. I’m sure this will be one of the big selling points of the software.
Their encoding engine looks pretty good too. I know this has been around for a while on the windows version, but I have no experience of it. From the snippets shown on their web site though, it looks like it blows compressor away in terms of features and usability. Compressor is one of the few Apple applications that many of its regular users loath. Personally I think it’s ok, but I know many people who work with it regularly and complain about its buggy output and clunky behavior. Like I said, I’m fine with it, but then I’m not a heavy user of it. It will be interesting to see how Adobe’s version stacks up. It’s always good to have options.
Something important to note about both Premier Pro and Encore, is that the mac versions are intel only. (Send your hate mail to…..)
One product notable by it’s absence is GoLive. I think it’s pretty much taken for granted now, that GoLive CS2 will be the last ever version of that software. It does appear as if they have rolled some of the features into Dreamweaver too. In particular, Dreamweaver now sports GoLive’s CSS layout options. Other new cool features of Dreamweaver are the included AJAX functions. They have added numerous AJAX tools which are accessible by mere mortals, as opposed to programmers and web coders. Overall Dreamweaver looks impressive.
Illustrator and Indesign both have the new palette and interface design first shown with the beta of Photoshop, including the single column tool bar and the docking palettes. Illustrator’s new live colour function looks pretty cool. If it looks familiar, it is because it bears a remarkable resemblance to the Adobe Kuler website, which I suspect was an off shoot of the development process for Illustrator. It’s pretty impressive though. Basically, instead of giving your artwork fixed colours, you can assign a “live” colour palette, the colours on which have a relationship to each other, so you can adjust all the colours simultaneously while maintaining the relationship to each other. Visit the Adobe website for a cool video demo.
Notable features of Indesign are the new multi place tool, which looks great. In essence, you “load up” your place cursor with content then click to place them one by one into multiple placeholders. This is much better explained by the videos on the Adobe website than I am doing here. Again, if you’re an InDesign user, I think you’ll appreciate this feature.
After Effects Professional CS3 which is the new elongated name for what is essentially After Effects 8.0, features some useful new features, however the thing that most After Effects users will appreciate is Intel compatibility. For motion graphic designers like myself, this has been a key sticking point in moving to a mac pro and will be an important milestone. Other interesting features are the new puppet tool and pledged better support for multiple processors. According to the website, this means that After Effects will attempt to render multiple frames simultaneously whenever possible.
After Effects also offers better integration with Photoshop including layer style support, and a new utility called brainstorm. Brainstorm lets you try variations by selecting animate-able parameters and giving you previews of what variations of those animations might look like. It sounds a little like a gimmick, but I’ll be fair to them and reserve judgement until I get to use it. Also new, and much requested, is the ability to animate individual text characters in 3d space. They have also added “shape layers” which essentially lets you draw and animate vector shapes without having to go to illustrator.
Photoshop CS3 has been out in beta for a while now, so I won’t go into details on that, however the new Photoshop Extended offers some interesting new functionality. There will undoubtedly be some contention as to whether or not these features should have been included in the standard version of Photoshop or not, but I won’t go into that now. From my own perspective, the video options are the most important, especially with the ability to clone from the previous and next frames. Other features include the ability to paint on HDR images, although why this wasn’t included in the standard version is beyond me. It also has the ability to paint directly onto 3d models, although the object file support seems a little limited, but at least the major file formats are covered. It is difficult to comment on these features without trying them, so I will reserve judgement until I get my hands on a copy.
That’s about it for now. There is a lot more to explore in this mammoth software release, and as I said at the beginning, these are just my initial reactions to the announcements, as a designer. I encourage anyone who is interested to explore Adobe’s extensive details on their website.
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