COOL-TECH REVIEW: Adobe's CS4 An Upgrade Worth Having.
Sometimes it’s a little difficult to do whatever it is that I do here at Eclipse. Last June, the folks at Adobe brought a bunch of us tech reviewers and writers up to New York to take a look at the latest and greatest of their offerings – Adobe CS4, with the caveat that everything was embargoed until they officially announced it in September. The problem with embargoes is, I’m very much a in the moment kind of person, where I’m excited and really want to talk about something the day I learn about it. When I have to wait months before I could even mention I even went to New York, my excitement level for CS4 kind of waned. I finally got my retail copy of the Adobe Master Collection a few weeks ago and have been playing with it. This is the most feature rich update that has come out in quite a while with numerous changes and tweaks to some of their key apps where needed, and in other cases they smartly left well enough alone.
The Master Collection is a beast of a collection and at almost $2,500 for the full version – upgrade pricing (at $899) is a lot cheaper, you are getting everything Adobe has to offer including OnLocation, InDesign, Premiere, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Contribute, Photoshop, Acrobat, Fireworks, and all their million little utilities. With an application toolbox this big it is almost impossible to review everything, so I’m going to touch on the highlights. It’s hard to figure out where to start….
Let’s start with the installation, it’s not for the faint of heart, which I am. This sweet is bloated and comes in at almost 26 Gigs and a 2 hour install. I feel bad because I sent numerous angry emails to Adobe regarding my installation issues, I had to get rid of the beta version before it installed properly. Once I did that, I realize that complaining about the bloat on a package this full featured and with this many apps is kind of ridiculous. Of course it’s large, it contains over 12 Professional Level apps, plus all of Adobe’s smaller utilities.
Every time I review a CS Collection, I mention the navigation and uniformity of the suite. I’ve appreciated what Adobe has tried to do and with each iteration they come closer and closer to their goal. The entire CS 4 collection has a new uniformed and streamlined look to it. Each version gets more and more stable. Switching between all the apps in the suite is becoming more and more seamless with each version. Each product comes with pre-built layout templates that you can select across each app.
It’s actually pretty slick working with files across apps is straightforward. You can start your project in Adobe Premiere, clean up the video overlays in Photoshop, clean up the audio in Soundbooth, composite your creation in After Affects and then put your creation on DVD. The problem is, it still takes seemingly forever to launch your first project, but it seems like once it’s up switching becomes easier. Not only that, but Adobe has a new Office Suite at Acrobat.com that will let you store and further create products. It connects pretty easy with Premiere and Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s consumer/entry level products.
My favorite products in Adobe’s lineup of tools are still Premiere Pro, After Effects and Soundbooth. The surprise in this year’s collection is actually the power and feature changes in both Fireworks and Flash.
I used to think of Fireworks as just this simple little graphic design tool for the web. Where you can easily go in and create some buttons and collateral for websites. This year they have really beefed up the application by making it almost a full-blown self contained Air applications. Following the examples on the Press Disk, I had a pretty slick little Air database up and running within an hour. Just by clicking some buttons, dragging images around and then saving the project out as a fully interactive Air app. Very neat stuff.
Adobe Flash was always one of those apps that I could see the potential of, but it’s difficulty always intimidated me so I never bothered with it. Flash CS4 has taken some of the mystery out. Animating objects and creating key-frames is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons. You no longer have painstakingly go animate individual frames on a time line to move an object. You simply click the object you want, set your beginning point, drag it across the screen to an end point and click render. It’ll automatically calculate your frame rate and animate your object. There’s also a new Boning tool that will automatically animate individual pieces of an object. For instance if you create a character, you can select his individual arms and legs and animate each part with this tool. Or if you have something like a crane, you automatically animate each individual piece of that crane. The new animation tools will save Flash animators hours, sometimes day’s worth of work. It’ll even make it so that a novice like me can get something up and running in less than a few minutes. Of course all of the old advanced features are still there if you want to use them, it’s just hidden now.
There’s a new project format called XFL, which will eventually replace the FLA format. InDesign and After Affects support this new format for use with Flash. I’m not entire sure, why Adobe felt the need to create yet another proprietary form. Adobe hope’s 3rd parties will start using this new format. Other tools in CS4 like Premiere don’t support it. So if you use it, you have to open your XFL file in After Effects and save it into a format that Premiere actually recognizes. It’s a silly waste of time.
After Effects CS4 has received some lovin this time around as well. New this year is a cool Motion Tracking tool called Mocha, this used to be a $300 add on, that is now included as a standard thing. Mocha let’s you set an image into a video clip and it’ll automatically track the image throughout the entire timeline, without the need for key-framing. When I was editing our old TV Show, putting our little animated “bug” at the bottom of the screen was actually quite a tedious process that took a good half hour to do. With this, you can do it with the click of a few buttons.
There’s a new uniformed 3D tool that let’s you manipulate 3D space using a 3 button mouse. The left button let’s you rotate sideways, while the middle and right buttons handle the zooms. When you zoom in and out of a clip there’s now an auto resolution feature that makes the transition smooth. There’s a really awesome new feature that turns live action into cartoons. Similar to what director Richard Linklater did in A Scanner Darkly. Instead of taking years to produce that effect, it’s done with one mouse click.
Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and InDesign received incremental changes this year, including support for more file formats, meta tagging capabilities, more support for 3D and some interface tweaks. InDesign now has fuller support for Flash and new new XFL format. I honestly didn’t notice much newness in these 3 apps. DW does handle CSS editing a little better, but not enough to be wowed by.
This year’s round of upgrades really does offer numerous improvements in the video apps that make upgrading worthwhile if you are into video and especially if you didn’t get last year’s upgrade. There’s a lot of new and very cool stuff here. For print and web designers, I’m not convinced that there have been enough changes to warrant the expense. There are several different package options you can get – Design Premium for Designers, Web Premium for Web Designers, Production Premium for Video Producers and the Master Collection. Check out Adobe.com for more information, and Acrobat.com if you want to check out some of the consumer level editing tools in the cloud.
Final Grade B
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 12.13.08