Adobe Creative Suite - Production Studio Premium product reviews

What a toolbox for the visually creative! This pack has everything you need to put together almost any multimedia project you can imagine! With evey base covered, from flat-art to movies, audio and video, anyone will have the right tools, if they have this bundle.

Not being much of a multimedia artist myself, having not had much call for it in my usual line of work in the print media, I was of course more taken with the design-oriented applications, primarily Photoshop, but when I started to explore After Effects even my flat-art gained a new dimension. Being comfortable with the idea of building up a final product by layers of raw material and effects, it wasn't a big leap to get a quick grasp of how After Effects worked through it's Timeline window.

The biggest leaps was 'Raw Materials' now also contained more media types, including a huge array of audio, video and image formats. The whole drag-n-drop nature of the interface made assembling some quick practice files a breeze. The basics can be slapped together after 30 minutes of just 'poking all the buttons' due to the very intuitive workspace and menu design. This gave me the confidence to make the step up to realworld footage, and unpack the camcorder.

Finding a common feel in Premiere, it was amazing how easy I found it to start mangling and mixing video tracks, both from the camcorder and DVDs, as well as content I made myself in After Effects. The smooth integration of applications, and especially the Dynamic Link and Bridge features, made advancing through ability a fun and cruisy experience. Not only is this suite designed to harness some stunning media-rendering engines, but the interface pretty much explains itself as you go along.

However, despite it's great layout, I did find the look of it a bit rough. A lot of harsh angles, in today's 'smooth and glassy look' fashion environment is a bit grating on the eye. So, now that the engine and drivetrain are sorted, how about putting someone on the task of dealing with the bodywork and paintjob? With the barriers between hardware starting to blur and standardise, the ability to customise the interface at the user-level is a biggie, so if Adobe ever decide to make the interface skin'able, and release some authorised toolkit to make it happen, I could see this package gaining a few more points in the 'ease of use' area, greatly expanding the opportunities for new and underexperienced users to create masterworks.

Being almost totally tone deaf, and rapidly losing what little I have left, I decided I would leave 'Audition' for another reviewer, but I did have a quick tinker with it, and found it to be a little overwhelming. However, I should moderate that with the fact that I still managed to load in a number of audio files in various formats, apply effects and filters with relative ease, and even mix a few channels around, cut, paste and crop waveforms, and even set up a repeating loop as a base track... so I know it was no fault of the software that the results sounded akin to a small cat trying to hoik up a hairball the size of a grapefruit, wrapped in crinkle-paper.

Combining all of the results from my various playings into a DVD discimage was a snap with Encore, and allowed me an amazing degree of design flexibility. Though Encore would have to be the hardest of the applications to grasp, this is more than made up for by the sheer grunt it has. As the final stage in the design-&-assembly chain, this really is the most multifunctional of the individual elements of the package. This one, I could easily spend another year just getting to grips with.

Overall, the suite as a whole might seem a little pricy for the beginner, but it would be a wise investment for those serious enough and able to afford such. For those who's means stretch to this pricerange, consider this... if you could justify buying and using any *2* of these applications, then you will probably be saving time and money by buying the whole pack. This also leaves you with the abilty to explore and expand either your personal design and media skills, or those of your company. The only features missing that I felt would make this the ulitmate media bundle were a decent 3d package, and perhaps something to cover the non-DVD interactive stuff. But since there are plenty of apps out there for that anyways, and I would be hardpressed to imagine any that wouldn't output something compatible to import into the suite, there's not a huge hole with their lacking.

Another stunning collection of powerful, user-friendly software from Adobe.