Adobe Video Collection

Adobe, now a major force in the desktop software market, produces a range of over 40 applications, four of which make up the Adobe Video Collection Standard Edition. Many Adobe products are complementary and, depending on your viewpoint, you can either regard this as a good way of providing reasonably priced packages that don't have unwanted functionality, or a marketing ploy to hook customers into buying more products.

Perhaps in a move to rebuff the latter criticism, Adobe recently started to market collections of closely related products, at an overall saving compared to buying the components individually. The Video Collection Standard Edition we review here is one of these bundled suites with a recommended price of £1,075.13 inc VAT. This represents a saving of £903.59 compared to the cost of purchasing all the components individually.

With the Standard Edition of the Video Collection you get Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5 SE, Audition 1.5 and Encore DVD 1.5. There is also a Pro Edition at £1,568.63 inc VAT, which adds Adobe Photoshop CS and After Effects 6.5 Professional Edition.

These price differentials represent a huge saving and it's worth going for the collection if you intend to purchase even three of these products. Many people interested in such software will probably already have one or two recent versions and will be in a position to upgrade them for a small fee. As Adobe upgrade fees average around £70, it is worth calculating if the Collection is worth going for or if upgrades, plus a single new purchase, make more sense.

Premiere Pro 1.5

At the core of both versions of the collection, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 is a non-linear digital video, hard disk-based, editing system. Video editing tends to generate many files and use large amounts of disk space.

With Premiere Pro 1, project files multiplied and got out of hand, resulting in projects that were hard to transport and control. In version 1.5 perhaps the most useful new feature is the new Project Manager that makes it easier to collect all files associated with a project and move them to another location. The Project Manager helps to reduce project sizes by identifying and excluding unused clips, preview files and conformed audio. You can also perform all editing offline in low resolution for speed, copy the finished edit, shorn of all unused content, and then recapture at a higher resolution, for a more compact project.

Improved audio in version 1.5 allows precise positioning and editing of audio clips through the Snap-on Sample option, and adds two new audio plug-ins; the De-hummer for removing mains hum and the De-esser for removing sibilance or hiss.

On the visual side, Bezier controls have been added to keyframing for smoother, more natural results in motion paths, and there are some really stunning new 3D effects where, for example, moving video can be played behind a rotating effect. Four auto-colour adjustment filters, similar to the auto-colour filters found in Photoshop, have been added that make it easy to correct for colour or contrast imbalance - up to Premiere 6.5 a hardware accelerator card such as the Matrox RT.X10 or RT.X100 was required for such effects. All these improvements build on the considerable progress made in Premiere Pro 1 to make version 1.5 a really excellent non-linear video editor, capable of professional, broadcast-quality results.

After Effects 6.5 Standard

If the video effects in Premiere Pro 1.5 just don't take you quite far enough, then Adobe After Effects 6.5 Standard provides more than 150 visual effects, flexible text animation tools, and integrated vector paint tools.

This is all within a 2D or 3D compositing environment that allows you to create stunning and complex motion graphics and visual effects. In the context of the Video Collection, one of the most useful features of After Effects 6.5 is its extended integration with both Encore DVD and Premiere Pro 1.5. With Encore DVD, After Effects can easily be used to spice up menu button highlights with animated flares or to add background animations. With Premiere Pro, moving between Pro and After Effects is almost seamless.

Encore DVD 1.5

With the Encore DVD authoring program, Adobe added a major new application to its line. It applied the same design structures and techniques it had developed with its flagship application Photoshop and, once you grasp this, Encore DVD is both easy to use and very powerful. However, as is often the case with version 1 of any application, there were a number of usability issues and/or bugs that took a little getting used to.

These mainly fell into two groups - problems with 'invisible' and unwanted objects disrupting the linking and routing between visible and wanted objects and errors caused by sloppy editing in source video. Encore DVD 1 also received some criticism for offering a rather limited range of prebuilt buttons and menu layouts - these have been considerably extended in version 1.5.

There's a new Styles Palette that allows storage and retrieval of layer effects such as shadows and bevels for application to buttons and menus. Although Encore DVD 1 had object Align and Distribute tools, menu layout could be a bit tricky. The new menu-guides display and Snap-to settings in version 1.5 make menu design and layout easier. Project checking and power over user operational controls have also been improved.

Audition 1.5

Adobe Audition 1.5 is promoted by Adobe as the professional tool for recording, editing, mixing and mastering digital audio, including soundtracks for video productions.

Audition started life as Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro. In August, 2003 Adobe acquired the technology assets of Syntrillium Software and re-launched it as Adobe Audition 1.

Now in version 1.5 Adobe has added some powerful new features, including integrated CD burning (a real time saver for quick demos and finished mixes), Rewire and VST support, clip time stretching and centre channel extraction for removing vocals. There's also a library of new royalty-free loops (over 5,000 loops are now available) and sample sessions to help you create low-cost backing tracks for your video. But perhaps the most striking new feature in Audition is the Frequency Space Editing tool. This allows audio to be analysed and displayed as spectral content over time. It is then possible to select sounds by their spectral 'fingerprint' and selectively process them. For example extraneous noises, such as a cough during a classical music recital, can be isolated and removed, with almost no audible effect on the continuity. Automatic click/pop elimination is also a snap during restoration work on old or damaged recordings.

In look and feel Audition obviously remains Cool Edit. One of the things that made this stand out from other audio applications was its looks, which don't appeal to all. A new skin will have to be introduced before Audition looks like part of the Adobe family.

Photoshop CS

For many years, Photoshop has been one of the top products for still image manipulation. It has a reputation of being extremely powerful, but not particularly easy to use. This is because you have to acquire a visual language and an extensive knowledge of colour theory and graphics design working methods to be a power user, rather than it being a fault in the program. Photoshop really doesn't cater to the one click novelty special effects brigade.

Many of the enhancements in Adobe Photoshop CS are a little obscure, since as an application, Photoshop is very mature. For video, apart from the ready integration with Premiere and After Effects, there is now support for non-square pixels. This allows for easy creation of images in a variety of video formats and fine control over aspect ratios, so there's no need for resizing or rendering when exporting to video applications.

For still images there is a Match Color feature that can read the colour statistics of an image or layer, and then apply them to another. There's also support, through a plug-in called Camera Raw, for raw image handling from over 30 digital cameras.

For web designers Adobe Image Ready CS makes getting Photoshop-layered files in the Flash editing environment a two-step process. For graphic designers there is a Layer Comps feature that records and recalls versions of the same basic design, making it easy to present alternate designs to a client.

Capable and complex

By grouping four of its products (five in the Pro edition) at the same time as version stepping all of them and increasing the integration, Adobe has produced an extremely powerful toolkit, fully capable of creating complex video and audio to a professional broadcast level, using standard desktop or laptop PCs.

Contact: Adobe 020 8606 1100
www.adobe.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows XP
• Pentium III 800MHz processor (Pentium 4 3GHz recommended)
• 256MB of Ram (1GB recommended)
• 800MB of free hard-disk space for installation

Price details:
RRP: £1,075.13 (£915 ex VAT)Standard edition;
£1,568.63 (£1,335 ex VAT) Pro edition