Suite News
The Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium package shipping later this fall includes After Effects CS4 Professional, Premiere Pro CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended (pictured), Flash CS4 Professional, Illustrator CS4, Soundbooth CS4, Encore CS4, OnLocation CS4, Device Central CS4, and Bridge CS4.
Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, everyone who touches Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium will experience a different product as they inevitably bend the myriad new features to fit their own projects and creative goals. We enlisted Franklin McMahon and Jan Ozer to give their perspectives on the new wide-ranging suite — which includes After Effects CS4 Professional, Premiere Pro CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, Flash CS4 Professional, Illustrator CS4, Soundbooth CS4, Encore CS4, OnLocation CS4, Device Central CS4, and Bridge CS4.
Adobe's Web and Design suites are where you'll find Fireworks CS4, InDesign CS4, and Dreamweaver CS4, and a Master Collection suite includes every program. We'll stick to the production package for this overview. Here's a preview of what to expect from Adobe's heavy Production Premium box when it ships later this fall.
BY JAN OZER
I'll have to complete many projects with Adobe's CS4 Production Premium to flesh out the details totally, but here's my first take. Note that this is a high-level first look of a beta product, not a knock-down, drag-out, take-no-prisoners review — which will come once we get our hands on a shipping copy.
At a high level, it feels as though the upgrade has a few very significant new features and a lot of little new features, on the order of enhanced keyboard shortcuts and a more robust timeline display. Some of the major new features that I don't discuss include a completely updated interface and Intel Mac compatibility for OnLocation, AVCHD support in Premiere Pro, and advanced metadata support. These are quite compelling, and I look forward to using them all in future projects.
Premiere Pro
I wanted to start with Premiere Pro's new audio-to-text function, which Adobe demonstrated back at NAB. As the name suggests, the new feature converts audio to text, and it lets you search for and play back sections based upon the text content. Downstream from the editor, the text will remain associated with the audio so that a web viewer could also search for and play back video based upon the textual content — although these functions aren't included out of the box. Rather, they'll require some custom Flash programming to produce.
Conceptually, the audio-to-text function has two levels of potential functionality tied to the accuracy of the transcription. First, if the transcription is reasonably accurate, you can use the text to more quickly locate relevant sections within the video. For example, in Figure 1, I was searching for the passage in which Congressman Rick Boucher started discussing a new bill he introduced to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Audio quality in this shot was fairly good for Boucher, but not so good for the interviewer (moi), who was miked up to another camcorder. As you can see in the figure, the Metadata panel makes it easy to perform simple word searches. When Boucher was speaking, the transcription was about 90-percent to 95-percent accurate; this was certainly good enough to help me quickly find the clips that I was looking for.
Figure 1. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 allows you to use transcribed speech to search for video snippets. Accuracy will vary based on the audio quality of the source material.
When I was speaking off-mic, audio quality was poorer, and accuracy dropped significantly — perhaps down into the 40-percent-to-50-percent range. The obvious conclusion is that the accuracy will vary with the source content, which isn't surprising because that applies to all speech-to-text technologies.
The second use of transcribed speech is for subtitles, open and closed captions, and pure transcriptions. Again, at 90-percent to 95-percent accuracy, you've got a great start — but you'll still need to devote some cleanup time to make the text totally usable.
Cleaning up the text within the Metadata window isn't an easy chore; you have to edit a word at a time and right-click to insert a word before or after a particular word or even to delete a word. I'm guessing that structure was necessary to maintain synchronization with the underlying audio. Or you can copy all text and paste it into a word processor, which is the best workflow if you don't need to maintain the linkage between the text and audio.
To create the text, perform the Transcribe to Text operation after capture via a simple menu item of the same name or by using the Transcribe button in the Metadata panel. You can also perform the task in Soundbooth CS4, the audio editor that comes in the suite. On a 2.66GHz dual-processor, quad-core HP xw8400 workstation, it took 2:50 (min:sec) to convert 2:22 of audio to text.
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Interestingly, when you run the transcription function, Premiere Pro transfers the job to the Adobe Media Encoder, which now runs as a separate application and can batch-process multiple tasks — including transcription and traditional encoding (Figure 2). To start encoding, export your timeline sequence as before, which opens Media Encoder.
For transcription jobs, for which the goal is clear, the Adobe Media Encoder starts working immediately; for other jobs, you have to choose a preset. Adobe added lots of presets to the new build, including many F4V presets for producing H.264 files for Flash deployment. As you can see in the figure, Adobe also added Watch Folder functionality, allowing multiple users with disk access to a common folder to share encoding capabilities.
Once you send the timeline sequence to Media Encoder, Premiere Pro is completely freed and ready to edit — a wonderful timesaver. You can also directly import and encode a standalone file, a Premiere Pro sequence, or an After Effects composition.
Figure 2. Adobe Media Encoder CS4 now features batch operation to process tasks including transcription and traditional encoding.
Encore
Similarly, you can now export a timeline sequence from Premiere Pro to Encore without encoding; this is a long-awaited addition to Dynamic Link that will benefit all DVD producers. With CS3, for example, you couldn't import your video into your DVD until it finished rendering — which could take hours if not days on some longer, multicamera HD projects.
As with Photoshop files and After Effects compositions, when working with the Premiere Pro sequence, you can always choose Edit > Original from the menu. This takes you back to Premiere Pro, where any changes are immediately incorporated back into your Encore project. Overall, the ability to delay this rendering until you've finished authoring and are ready to burn is a huge leap forward that can easily make the difference between making or missing a deadline.
Once you have your video in Encore, you'll find several nice additions — most importantly, the ability to add pop-up menus to your Blu-ray titles. To be clear, Encore CS3 could produce Blu-ray discs with HD content, but it offered no additional menu-related Blu-ray features. To be fair, this is the same level of Blu-ray support offered by most other prosumer authoring programs such as Sonic Solutions Roxio DVDit Pro HD and Sony Creative Software DVD Architect.
With CS4, you can now create menus that pop up over the video while it's playing (Figure 3), instead of forcing the viewer to return to a chapter or the main menu to navigate elsewhere. Here's the workflow.
From the main menu, click File > New > Pop-up menu. That creates a menu from the currently selected template with a transparent background layer. You can edit this menu as normal — including (of course) round-trip editing in Photoshop, which is how I made the white backgrounds behind the text menus transparent. However, when designing your menus, note that Encore will ignore any content that's not on a button layer; if you're going to add titles or logos, they must be on a button layer.
Once the menu is complete, you have to associate it with the timeline that contains the video it will appear over, which you'll do in the timeline's Properties panel. Note that you can associate the same pop-up menu with more than one timeline.
Figure 3. Adobe Encore CS4 offers Blu-ray pop-up menus. I know, I know, the background is awful in this shot; on-location shoots can be a bear.
However, Encore's preview function won't preview the pop-up menu; the only way to view the menu above the timeline is to choose a frame via timecode in the Pop-up tab of the Properties window, and then Encore will display the pop-up menu over that frame. This is shown on the right in Figure 3, where I chose the boucher/boucher.prproj2 project with the background frame at 6:25:00. Also on that tab, you can see the Set as Blu-ray Pop-up Menu checkbox that you'll have to check. It's a touch complicated, but it all works, and you'll be rewarded with an effect that you can't produce with any other prosumer authoring program.
Adobe also beefed up Encore's Flash-export functions, adding templates (including several widescreen templates) and allowing the export of an .fla file that you can further edit in Flash (in addition to the .swf output).
What's the bottom line? For me, the ability to delay rendering from Premiere Pro until I was ready to burn a disc in Encore would have saved time and perhaps improved the creativity of my work on every DVD project that I've produced in Premiere Pro and Encore. Without question, if you create DVD projects or Flash output in Encore, this feature alone is worth the upgrade price.
From a competitive perspective, the integrated text-to-speech function will resonate with news organizations and broadcasters, as well as those who produce content for which the ability to search by text could be valuable to the viewer or listener. Finally, pop-up menus will be the must-have feature for all Blu-ray producers going forward. Overall, through the admittedly narrow focus that I've applied to CS4, this new release is a real winner.
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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