Adobe’s CS4: Updating The Army Of Davids’ Toolkit
Speaking of rendering, compared with earlier versions, the rendering options for Premiere have been greatly expanded, with a greater emphasis on both high definition (including Blu-Ray) and Web-oriented outputs. Premiere CS4 ports video out to a separate Media Encoder application, which can run in the background while other programs (including Premiere itself) are also running. It can also render multiple video formats concurrently, perfect when a video needs to be uploaded to multiple platforms, including cell phone devices. Rending a project to Flash still takes a fair amount of time, but Premiere Pro CS4 does seem like it crunches video on the timeline into Flash much faster than the previous version of Premiere Pro that I’ve used, CS2.
Photoshop CS4
The CS4 version of Photoshop has been updated with several new features. There’s a fun new 3D shapes feature, which will morph any photo around a variety of three dimensional designs, including squares, globes, pyramids–even wine bottles! Whether it’s manipulating still photos, or combined with the digital effects possible in video programs such Premiere and After Effects, it seems safe to say that this feature will get quite a workout in years to come.
But perhaps the most intriguing new feature in Photoshop, certainly to those in the Pajamahadeen concerned with the manipulation of imagery along the lines of former Reuters stringer Adnan Hajj, is the new content aware scaling feature, which will allow the a photo with a neutral background to be recomposited while its foreground objects remain undisturbed. For example, a photo of a person at the beach can be adjusted from vertical to horizontal proportions, with the background of sand water changing shape, but the person who is the subject of the photo stays properly proportioned, as this video clip demonstrates. Expect this feature to get quite a workout amongst print-based photo editors.
After Effects CS4
After Effects, which is to video what Photoshop is to still photos, has its share of new 3D effects as well. There are several new plug-ins for three dimensional text animation in the Adobe Bridge (which provides a list of presets and ties all of the CS4 products together), and the motion tracking feature has been significantly upgraded. This viral election year video employs a variety of simple motion tracking effects–and the new edition of After Effects can do this and more with ease.
Last year, Charles Schwab created a minor splash by digitally overlaying a cartoon effect on their commercials. Since then, a number of plug-in manufacturers have produced third party products that produce this effect, but it’s now built into After Effects CS4, along with several other new filters.
Premiere Pro CS4 is also much more seamless integrated with After Effects, making it easy to export clips from Premiere into AE and back again. For adding additional effects to video, this is a powerful feature.
There’s still room for improvement though. For example, unfortunately, Premiere Pro CS4 still doesn’t allow for titles to be imported into Adobe After Effects for adding animation, or Photoshop, unless first converted into a still image. (AE will take a cut and paste of the titles, but not the whole saved title file.) Given how sophisticated these three programs have become, this would seem to be an easy addition.
But the flaws that I found in my initial use of CS4 seemed pretty minor in the scope of things, and the features significantly outweigh any minor bugs. If it’s been a while since you’ve changed versions of the component programs with the CS4 line and your computer is powerful enough to support these products, it may be high time to investigate an upgrade.
(Note: an earlier version of this article appeared in Blogcritics back in October, based upon on the beta versions of the products discussed herein.)
Apple’s freeware iPhoto, iMovie & OpenSource software GIMP would pretty much do enough to equal Adobe’s pricey sw.
Best.
iPhoto and iMovie are not freeware. You are obliged to pay for it when you buy a new Mac or want to upgrade. The new versions of Windows Movie Maker, photo gallery and Paint.NET are free to anyone running Windows XP or Vista.
Every version, these tools get bulkier and more unwieldy, not to mention more expensive. Adobe’s upgrade for their Reader 9 recently (which was a disaster and barely worked) cured my desire for any more Adobe “upgrades”.
Adobe’s “upgrades” continue to get larger and bulkier, and is this one really worth the price tag assigned to it?
Be honest: did Adobe give you a free evaluation copy?
I heartily recommend the Corel products as well. I’ve got CS2, and still use it, but have found myself increasingly opening Corel’s products more and more, especially for less complex tasks.
Their Painter series is, of course, always top notch, without comparison. But, now, I’ve really started appreciating their CorelDraw X4, which is a significantly cheaper alternative to Adobe’s design suite, with associated programs that make Photoshop and Illustrator mostly unneeded.
Corel has a really top-notch video program as well. I’m not done HD video with it yet, but it’s otherwise been extremely useful.
What I love about Corel is that they know they’re not market leaders, and so have made everything immensely user friendly and able to play well with others. They are much, more more intuitive and less menu driven. Instead of having purposeful lapses in working with other companies, they offer the ability to save or export in a massive amount of file formats.
To be sure, Adobe is better. But, for 95% of what needs to be done Corel is equally good, generally easier, and has other benefits, such as being significantly cheaper.
Corel deserves a little applause for their efforts.
There are tons of shareware and freeware – for Windows, Mac, and Linux – which include most of the features of these expensive expert tools. They are not implemented as beautifully, but if you are doing rough and ready guerilla multimedia you shouldn’t care. This is like buying a Ferrari to drive to the grocery store every week.
if you want to turn out a slick product, ok. But not only are the tools you’ve described going to run you $2000 total, they have a steep learning curve. Not to mention why you want to do fauxtography in the first place.
Anyway, the real action is in social software, which is free or pretty cheap. As in I got a good twitter client for my iphone for $3, and ok ones for free. And most of the web spaces are free. What counts is the communication and organization, not production values.
I too, agree with Paddy O’s comments on Corel. Much more intuitive the Adobe. Particularly, why anyone would use Illustrator over Draw is beyond me.
Now, I’ve never been a video guy, but After Effects CS4 sounds promising. Viral video just got more interesting.
As for photoshop, I only know enough to be dangerous, but I’m sure the media boys n girls will have fun w/ the added bells & whistles manufacturing more ‘news’!
TY EBD, Jr for the review.
I fundamentally disagree with Adobe that Acrobat Professional is worth $500.00 and is so bloated it requires a DVD or multiple CD’s to install it.
I also disagree that a program as obtuse and complex as Photoshop is somehow worth $800.00.
In my experience the only thing Adobe has going for it is Dreamweaver which they bought from another company. Their new stuff is over priced to the point that, for me at least, it is just not worth the cost. Dreamweaver 8 is as far as I am willing to go with them. And yeah, like others have pointed out, there are lots of freeware and lower cost alternatives out there.
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By the way, I hope all you rich liberals out there are going to pay a bunch of taxes because Joe Biden said it’s your patriotic duty to do so and I am waiting for my share of the free stuff Obama promised me.
Apple’s suite, Final Cut Studio, is as good as or better than Adobe, with the added benefit that Macs don’t usually crash and burn every ten minutes and have almost no viruses and malware written for them… they run for weeks without getting slower, they are simpler to use and do the tech stuff on.. they even defrag automatically without even asking them to.
I have become a Mac guy over the past two years… once you go Mac, etc.
And I agree with the article’s premise.. I now have the tools to produce a major motion picture, all for a few hundred bucks and the right computer. Of course it’s about lighting and expensive cameras and actors and all that, but without any of those I can still produce what looks like a quality television show… amazing stuff, in such a short time.
If there was a competitor for Flash, Adobe would be in serious trouble.
Professionals use Adobe’s Creative Suite or Madcap products; they are well worth the price if you understand the software and can make use of all its components. In addition,they produce web and print documents that are far superior than cheap shareware or freeware software programs. If you don’t use software often and want freeware or shareware programs – that’s different. I produce printed and web documents for a living, and wouldn’t be caught dead using most of the programs listed above, Corel being the exeption. But then again, I have to produce first-rate products, or my reputation is finished.