Test Bench: Adobe Production Studio Video Production Suites

Morgan Paar
April 2006

Adobe's pro apps have not really thrilled us for some time. Sure, Photoshop, the king of imaging software, has consistently held the winner's belt in its class for more years than we can remember. But there have been few surprises from After Effects, (many higher-end editing programs can now do much of what AE is known for,) and Premiere made a rough, though necessary, transition into its "Pro" line. On the consumer side, Premiere Elements surely raised the bar for sub-$100 editing programs, but there hasn't been much causing us to gasp in the higher-end apps - until now.

On first look at the two new pro bundles we found ourselves using the "awesome" exclamation more than once, and this is not a word we throw around lightly. The bundles are Production Studio Standard ($1,199; includes After Effects 7 Standard, Premiere Pro 2, Photoshop CS2, Dynamic Link and Bridge) and Production Studio Premium ($1,699; upgrades to After Effects 7 Pro and adds Audition 2, Encore DVD 2 and Illustrator CS2.) Before we dig into the details of each program, we're going to examine the ground-breaking integration tools that link the individual products (keep an eye on future issues for a more thorough investigation of the individual apps.)

As with most current video production programs, these applications require a large amount of hard drive space, top-of-the-line processors and a healthy amount of RAM to run properly. The minimum system requirements (see Tech Specs) are exactly what the word implies: the minimum. If you're fortunate to run one of these bundles on a new system, the extra money you lay out for the fastest affordable processor is well worth the investment. More RAM always makes life easier, but you can add this with future paychecks. Fortunately, hard drives are quite inexpensive these days. You'll need more gigabytes than you've ever imagined, especially if you're looking at HD work.

We tested the pre-release Production Studio Premium on a Velocity Micro NoteMagix Z71 Ultra laptop with a Pentium M 780 (2.26GHz) processor running Windows XP Professional SP2 with 1GB RAM and a 100GB hard drive. The multi-disc loading process proceeded without drama and we were working through the tutorials in a reasonable amount of time.

The first thing editors will notice with the new programs is the slick new user interface (UI) that make Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition and Encore resemble each other. Gone are the free floating, overlapping palettes and tool bars. Each window dynamically attaches to the palette or tool bar adjacent to it. When the user moves his/her cursor over the border of two or more adjacent windows, the cursor turns to an arrow tool that allows resizing of the windows. Make one window smaller and its adjacent windows grows, leaving no empty space. Ingenious. Plus, windows can be detached and docked with other windows making for a very personal, custom workflow. This unified design environment enables the user to easily navigate among the four programs. Common commands, tools, keyboard shortcuts and control elements such as timelines and sliders are similar or identical, in all four programs. We did get confused at times thinking we were in Audition only to find ourselves in After Effects, but this should become less an issue with time.

The appearance and usability of the UI is just the beginning of a much tighter integration in the Adobe Production Suites.

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