Forget everything you think you know about Adobe and digital video.
While Adobe has long held a leading market share in the professional video-compositing world with After Effects, as late as last summer the publishing software giant had been seriously at risk of losing its foothold in the rest of the DV space. Premiere was cool, but outdated; the company had nothing to offer for publishing on the latest media to flood the mainstream (DVD), and no credible solution for working with the next big thing (High-Definition Television, or HDTV). And as for authoring audio, the biggest name in creative applications was as quiet as a mouse. Even After Effects users complained about that program’s second-rate keying and lack of titling capabilities.
Then in one stroke, the San Jose software giant completely revised its place in the video-production world when it released the Adobe Video Collection 2.0 for Windows in July 2003. A complete overhaul of existing products plus the addition of a few new ones, the Professional edition of the collection included After Effects Professional 6.0, Premiere Professional 1.0 (what would have been Premiere 7.0), Adobe Audition 1.0, Photoshop 7.0, Encore DVD 1.0, and an impressive set of third-party add-ons. A pared-down Standard Edition was also introduced.
Fast Forward to Now
At this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event in April, Adobe announced Adobe Video Collection 2.5, which includes “.5” upgrades to most of the previous version’s bundled applications that began shipping last week. The Video Collection Professional, which includes Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects Professional 6.5, Audition, Encore DVD1.5, and Photoshop CS, is priced at $1,499; the Standard edition (which substitutes After Effects Standard for the After Effects Professional, and does not include Photoshop) is $999.
The products are also sold separately, but it doesn’t make much economic sense to buy them piecemeal. Purchasing the Professional edition’s components individually at full ticket price would set you back $3,195. We can think of only one reason why you’d break up the set — if you use the Mac. The Digital Video Collection is for Windows users. Of the bundled applications, only After Effects and Photoshop run on the Mactintosh.
When the Video Collection 2.0 shipped last August, each of the products in the bundle was either totally new to market, or had undergone a major upgrade. Adobe paid special attention to making them all work together in productivity- and creativity-enhancing ways. In Video Collection 2.5, all of the products have been given modest feature enhancements, but more impressive is the host of new ways that they work together.
Features you have come to take for granted in Photoshop, for example, such as a powerful typesetting interface with fine control over character formatting, have been migrated to the other products. And in many places where it makes sense to do so, one program is now capable of working with and adjusting elements created in another. After Effects, Premiere, and Encore DVD can bring in Photoshop layers and type intact; Premiere can export timeline effects to After Effects; and Encore DVD can import design elements, complete with effects layers, from Photoshop, as well as importing movies and chapter markers from Premiere and After Effects. These enhancements, while sometimes subtle, are a well thought-out set of practical real-world workflow improvements.
In all, the Video Collection is an impressive upgrade at a bargain basement price, and it’s the first time we’ve seen a compelling reason to standardize on Adobe as a one-stop digital video brand.
Not Your Granny’s Premiere
If you’ve dabbled in digital video any time in the past decade, chances are good you’ve spent some time with Adobe Premiere. Long a favorite of educators, presentation artists, multimedia developers, and anyone needing basic, easy-to-use video editing capabilities, Premiere has held its own over the years. However, with the rise of Apple’s iMovie and various versions of Final Cut Pro on the Mac, and other low-cost professional video-editing systems for Windows from companies such as Sonic Foundry, Ulead Systems, Pinnacle, Avid Technology, and Media 100, Premiere 6.5 was seriously showing its age. It lagged in performance and production-oriented features for use in DV editing environments (not to mention newer, higher-end standards such as HDTV, and had lost any following as a professional video-editing tool.
The flagship product in the Video Collection is Premiere Pro ($699 if purchased separately), a name change we think is well justified. The group of Adobe engineers who developed Premiere Pro 1.0 did so apart from the team that continued to develop Premiere through version 6.5. As a result, Premiere Pro 1.5 could be called Premiere 7.5, but that’s not doing the new edition justice. Premiere Pro was really a complete, ground-up re-build — and it shows — from the powerful, highly-customizable interface, to the elegant use of command keys for the majority of common editing functions, to the sub-frame audio editing. Most impressive is the real-time performance of many transitions and effects. While a few familiar Premiere interface elements linger, these are basically window dressing; the underlying code, most of the functionality, and the performance across the board, are all new.
While the truly revolutionary changes came in version 1.0, Premiere Pro 1.5 offers important enhancements: better project management tools that let you quickly consolidate and package projects and media into new locations, support for HDTV video content, effects presets, Bezier keyframe controls, automatic color adjustments a la Photoshop, and support for the gamut of After Effects filters. This version even supports Panasonic’s 24P/24PA digital-video cameras, which have become a mainstay of indie filmmakers.
Unfortunately, Adobe had to cut off an arm — its base of loyal Mac users — to save a leg. (Although it could be argued that Apple’s own iMovie and Final Cut Pro set the stage for this painful decision by dishing out downright Microsftian competition to its developers.) Long-time Mac users of Premiere are howling, but at least they’re not alone: Adobe has also ditched every version of Windows prior to XP. The Adobe Video Collection depends upon core technologies in XP, such as DirectX, and it benefits mightily from the use of hyper-threaded and multiprocessor hardware. While upgrading to XP is a headache and expense in its own right (upgrades to XP from earlier versions of Windows cost between $99 and $200 on the street, not counting IT man hours) the performance and handling of the new Premiere, in this writer’s opinion, justifies the cost and aggravation of the upgrade. At least Microsoft is sure to agree.
Encore’s Second Act
Premiere isn’t the only new Adobe product to be Windows XP only: enter Encore DVD 1.5 ($549 if purchased separately). Adobe was nearly two years behind in the race to market with a DVD-authoring tool, and the company took the low road to filling the void: Instead of developing the technical underpinnings from scratch, it licensed most of the core technology needed to compress MPEG video streams and burn the result to a playable DVD, which it then combined with the many components it already had at hand. Encore borrows its timeline from Premiere, its type and compositing engine from Photoshop, its hyperlinking “pickwhip” and other interface widgets from Adobe GoLive, and interface conventions, such as tabbed-and-dockable palettes, from the Adobe lineup as a whole.
The result is the most immediately familiar, designer-friendly DVD authoring tool we’ve seen, and it works hand-in-hand with other Adobe applications to dramatically reduce the tedium and difficulty of creating great-looking DVD content. More importantly, this Adobe-style interface sits atop a remarkably strong technical base that offers on-the-fly non-destructive compression, high-density DVD authoring, and other high-end and productivity features that eliminate many of the usual gotcha’s in desktop DVD creation. Not only does Encore look and feel more mature than most competing DVD tools, but since its inception, it offered more and better functionality — a remarkable feat for product so new to market.
With version 1.5 of Encore DVD, Adobe introduced tight integration with Photoshop CS: You can now create and edit menus in Photoshop and have changes appear instantly in your DVD project. And nested layer sets and non-square pixels are also supported. Significantly, this version includes support for QuickTime formats — and performs MPEG compression in the background — which dramatically reduces the amount of pre-processing you have to do to get existing media onto a DVD.
On the Right Track With After Effects
After Effects has been around as long as Premiere, but unlike the video editor, it has continued to enjoy widespread use in the broadcast video world, as well as with countless other users in the multimedia creative space. So while After Effects 6.5 isn’t all new, it still has plenty of new features to get excited about.
Unlike the rest of Adobe’s video tools, After Effects 6.5 runs on the Macintosh, but as the other applications save Photoshop CS are Windows only, you’re looking at buying After Effects as a standalone product. After Effects Standard is priced at $699 while After Effects Professional, which adds such features as a Motion Tracker, network rendering, and the Keylight matte tool, is priced at $999. (We refer to the Professional edition in this overview.)
Version 6.0 introduced a feature-rich implementation of the Adobe typesetting interface — where almost any element can be animated — making it a powerful titling and text-animation tool in its own right. After Effects 6.5 already much-improved painting and cloning features now allows you to view your source and output in different areas while you work. Version 6.5 has taken advantage of its predecessor’s faster motion-tracking performance with new features that allowing for tracking an unlimited number of points (previously users were limited to tracking up to 4 points). The tracker can now track position and scale of objects as well.
OpenGL support, for near-realtime rendering of most 3D effects, is a boon to anyone working with 3D layers. This version also includes Keylight, formerly a $5,000 keying and mask-generation plug-in from The Foundry. There are many additional enhancements, and the Professional Version, in particular, has been souped up for high-volume compositing work with the addition of a scriptable rendering engine, and a file-referencing system that will be hailed by any compositor that has to work with large numbers of high-resolution files over a network.
Sounding Off With Audition
One of the components long overlooked in the multimedia and publishing space by major graphics vendors (think Adobe, Macromedia, and Apple) is audio. There are numerous companies with serious audio products aimed at serious musicians and sound engineers, but many of these are optimized for multi-track recording, and are ill-suited to the needs of video editors and multimedia artists who often work with existing audio tracks from video, canned sound effects, digital music loops, and audio and folio sounds from CD and countless other sources.
Adobe dived headlong into audio with the first release of the Video Collection. After Effects 6.0 introduced much-improved audio features, and Premiere Pro 1.0 originally shipped with a bonafide integrated audio mixer.
But the real audio news in this bundle is Audition 1.5 ($299 if purchased separately). This standalone multi-track mixer includes waveform editing, real-time effects processing and previews, loop-based soundtrack creation, surround-sound mastering, and impressive bit-rate conversion (for upsampling from audio CD to DVD rates, for example.) Like other Adobe products that excel at handling files from many disparate sources, Audition’s prowess is in blending materials from many sources into a single project.
As with the other applications in the collection, Audition is a good Adobe citizen. For example, Audition can be used as the audio editor of choice from within Premiere or After Effects, so if you make a change in Audition, it gets automatically updated in those programs. Like Premiere Pro, Audition 1.5 now supports VST plug-ins – an industry standard audio plug-in format – and there are many other new features for advanced music and audio work, including the capability to edit soundtracks from video sources in most file formats.
Photoshop In Transition
The Adobe Video Collection 2.5 Professional Edition ships with Adobe’s flagship Photoshop CS ($649 if purchased separately), which offers a huge number of improved features compared to previous versions and serves as a cornerstone of Adobe video products by allowing you to create menus, buttons, and other graphics that drop right into Premiere, After Effects, and Encore DVD projects.
Other important features for video artists include support for non-square pixels and the capability to transfer layers, some effects, such as transform modes, and live, editable type, directly into other Adobe applications.
A Complete Package
Although it would have been unthinkable a year ago to recommend Adobe as the source of a complete professional-level digital video editing and authoring system, we can now do so without hesitation. While you might assemble a collection of tools with better overall capabilities — including video editing, audio mixing and effects, graphic creation and image editing, titling, animation, compositing, and DVD authoring — you’d be hard pressed to do so for anywhere near the price. What’s more, this is a well conceived and implemented suite of tools that works smoothly together, which is something you won’t find in any other comparable collection of mix-and-match products.
This article was last modified on June 30, 2023
This article was first published on June 1, 2004
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