In a fit of boredom, I have decided to review Adobe. Or rather, the products Adobe, Inc. sells. More precisely, the products that I purchase and use from Adobe, Incorporated. Yes. It will probably be long. Deal with it.
To be clear, I use the Adobe Creative Suite 4– Master Collection, and almost everything on it.
Let’s get started.
Premiere Pro
So. I am, first and foremost, a film editor. I sit down, with footage that ranges between 5 minutes and 6 hours, and sort it, import it, review it, cut it, layer it, add to it, and finally export it as a finished product. (If you’re a fan of “The Marvelous Failures of Stephen Priest” on Facebook, you’ll get to see me in action when the time comes! In fact, you’ll get to see most of what I will talk about below in future videos there.) In an earlier post, I talked about some of the many projects I have worked on in the past, both professionally and as a pastime. I also have experience with programs like Apple’s Final Cut Studio Pro, Pinnacle Studio, and some Sony Vegas. And out of all of them, Adobe still rocks the party.
Here’s why (and I’ll use Final Cut for comparison, because it is the closest to me liking the others):
Adobe has made good use of its suites. It has successfully managed to allow all its programs to work seamlessly together when necessary. I can create documents in Photoshop or Illustrator, and drag them to an After Effects compilation, and drag that to Premiere, and drag THAT to Encore…it’s really nice. Final Cut has been ahead of this game for a while, but the difference between the programs are the features. In order to get all the looks and styles and effects you want in Final Cut, you must be well-versed in ALL its suite’s programs. This means learning Motion inside and out (which is the equivalent to learning After Effects…it’s hard) and the font program and the DVD program for more features. Adobe Premiere lets me create incredible amounts of effects on my own without having to know After Effects or Flash. This is helpful because 1: I don’t know After Effects; and 2: It saves time if simplicity is your thing.
There isn’t much more about it. Final Cut is so similar…it’s only flaw in my book is it’s an Apple experience, and I dislike the Apple experience. I’ll have to get used to it in the future, I suppose…oh wait…ADOBE IS APPLE-COMPATIBLE NOW. Oh yeah.
Encore
Not having much time to fiddle around with Final Cut’s DVD creation software, I only have cheap freeware programs and some of Vegas’ capabilities to compare it to. And lemme tell you…after they get all the bugs fixed, this program is flawless.
DVD creation is a rather vague concept to some people. For the most part, it implies taking video clips and throwing them onto an abstract idea that represents a DVD. Then, when they put it in the player, a picture comes up with little boxes that they navigate to on their over-sized remote, and then they watch stuff.
In reality, a lot of work must go into the menus, because no matter how you look at it, the DVD menu is that first impression. The customer is usually able to judge the work quality by the title screen. This is sometimes helpful to the creator, because very little work can go into it just to make it look nice. However, making it work correctly is another story, and an often-overlooked one. Several of my DVD projects wound up getting calls back on them, saying it looked wonderful, but the menus didn’t work right, and it skipped sequences, and so on. After all the work the editor puts into making a masterpiece of the random video clips they possess, wouldn’t it just be awful to have that overlooked by a flawed DVD menu?
Encore eliminates much of the hassle of reiteration that bores creators, and also allows insane amounts of interconnecting transitions, audio clips, and now Flash animations. Incredible. While still as unstable as its previous versions, this program is a keeper and a USER.
Soundbooth
I don’t understand why they got rid of Audition. They had a wonderfully-fitted piece of programming, complete with every available option in the music and sound-recording industry, and they dumbed it down to the equivalent of a converter tool and called it Soundbooth. I don’t really care- if I need better features, I still have Audition 1.5, or I can download Audacity for FREE and get a million more features. But I’m disappointed at Adobe for this one.
After Effects
Like I said before, I have almost no knowledge of this sophisticated tool. I wish I did, and hopefully will have time to sit down and learn it with some relevant project, but for now, I have to stick with Photoshop, or leave it to the pros.
Alright, so that was the video part. Onto…
Photoshop
After the video editing part, my next strong point is graphic design. I became well-acquainted with Adobe Photoshop two years ago, after doing all my design work solely in Macromedia Fireworks. Because I had no idea what I was missing.
To be honest, I don’t know of a single competitor to this program. It’s such a cultural byword now that it’s as common, if not more so, than the existence of Microsoft Word and Spider Solitaire on the average nerd’s computer. Most technical dabblers have at least several hour’s worth of experience on it, and the rest are so well-versed in its complexities that they can literally sell their bodies into the service of Adobe’s Support Teams. Since I am by no means that experienced in the program, this review might be very basic.
I love it! It can do anything, as long as the hands that guide it and the mind that peruses it are sharp and wise. The recent integration of easily-accessible video manipulations are helpful to the non-AE-users who prefer frame-by-frame drawing to flawless special effects. I do most of my work in Photoshop, including simple vector drawing, gratuitous surface painting, re-touching, and DVD cover designs for all the videos I edit. The WYSIWYG interface and smart panel layouts just make my day, and I breathe out a sign of contentment each time I double-click the blue, squared-off icon on my desktop.
It’s the little things that just feel RIGHT.
Illustrator
That marvelous name. It brings tears of joy to the poor artist lacking his beloved pad and stylus combo, grunting with effort and discouragement as his mouse slips again and again off the implied path he wished to follow. No more regret that you weren’t born into billions. No more wishing that points were somewhat easier to select. Oh, heavens! The sheer beauty of Adobe Illustrator, in all its vector glory!
To be honest, I don’t use it that much. I’m not a really gifted artist, because I’ve seen what some people can do with just this one program, and it blows my mind. However, for simple edge creation, tracing, manual posterization, and the countless other little chores I perform on it, the work level is minimal. Really an incredible program. Five thumbs up.
InDesign
The best, most extensive document designer known to mankind. I can’t believe people prefer Quark over this program…
Okay, I just downloaded the newest version of Quark XPressand tried it out for fairness’ sake and for my own amusement. And while a lot of features have been upgraded since I last used it, InDesign still stands a good head and shoulders taller. I guess the simplicity of Quark is a turn-on for industries, and the ease of diving into a new project makes for better timetables. I’ll have to experiment with it some more. But after getting used to InDesign, and knowing what I can and can’t do easily on it, and the seamless compatibility between it and Photoshop and Illustrator makes it my go-to document designer for the moment. I’ve used it for brochures, books, booklets, and tri-folds, and so far haven’t had any problems with the interface, the outputs, or anything else. Overall good program for designers.
My print media and video experience far outweighs my time spent in web design, so the following programs come from mostly a video usage or a first-year web design student. To start, I’ll dive into
Flash
…which is my favorite program in the Web Design suite and second-favorite program in the entire Master Collection suite (first is Photoshop). Not only is it an animation program capable of cartoon animation, an entire genre of games, and a breakthrough style of websites, which are quickly becoming the professional artist’s #1 choice for design. (My favorite site is this one. It’s the most unique use of Flash and video I’ve ever come across.)
Flash is the most versatile program I can immediately bring to mind. It has its claws in video, vector imaging, web, raster graphics, animation, and audio integration, to name a few. The programming language associated with it, ActionScript, is Adobe’s very own programming language, and stretches into its other web application programs. The first sort of experience I had with it was video animation effects. I drew over frames of my videos to create cartoon special effects and even designed some animations to “interact” with filmed characters. It was a brief period of time, and then I abandoned it for green screens, Photoshop, and other, more interesting pursuits.
I recently ran headlong into it as a form of web designer, trying to re-create the interactive beasts that roam the web nowadays, with little reward. A few brief online tutorials were not enough to teach me what I need to know, and the past year I’ve been learning the ActionScript 3.0 language at UCF. It’s extremely difficult, to say the least. (My final score in that class is a C. Yeah.) However, if I can master this program, and all its capabilities, it’s safe to say I’ll be pressing myself to go the extra mile for each project I do with it.
Dreamweaver
The web designer’s necessity. Almost as popular with HTML pros as Photoshop is with artists, Dreamweaver is the magical culmination of every web design freeware program known to mankind. It can handle JavaScript, CSS, PHP, XML, ActionScript, ASP, ColdFusion, XSLT, and every single variation of HTML on or off the face of planet Earth. Basically, it is the Chuck Norris of web design programs. Since all I know is how to peck out a simple web page in HTML, and write different font colors in CSS, and make a button click with JavaScript, this program is 99.98 times more than I’ll need for anything I do now. But for those of you (me) who want photos they edit dragged straight in from Photoshop or Illustrator, and seamlessly need stuff to work right, it’s a good investment.
Also, the new CS4 interface is genius.
Fireworks
For the most part, my artist’s weight tumbles my technical, computer-language-knowing girth, and therefore I’ll find myself gripping both sides of my head and going cross-eyes at the simplest of code, just to make the button go “CLICK” and send the oblivious site user to a different page. So the last few websites I made for myself were fabricated in Fireworks, linked together through the use of drop-down menus, and the code automatically-generated for me by Mr. Handy-Dandy Fireworks himself. It was cheating. It was ugly. But it worked, and now I know better.
Fireworks is primarily a drafting program. I can draw up a website visually, drag and drop buttons and logos and background images, and then slice it up however I want for easy downloading by browsers. It is then supposed to be imported into Dreamweaver and properly coded for the resulting good website. Haha. Shortcuts are awesome.
A wonderful little program. Just don’t start playing with 200-400MB files…terrible things can happen. Trust me.
Acrobat
Ahhh…Acrobat. We’re not talking about web design anymore…this is real, business-y discussion happening now. I will say it, and you don’t have to listen or anything. But it’s what I strongly push on new business owners.
Invest in Adobe Acrobat. It’s pretty expensive (the Extended version is $700 for a single license), but the payoff is enormous. Placing this program on each employee’s computer makes everyone’s life a million times easier. Collaboration on documents…any document you can create the Adobe products, and many more that Adobe doesn’t own. Changes and notes, video conferencing and presentations, form creation and sharing, web updates…I can go on. Check it out for yourself. And for designers like myself, who sometimes have to work at a distance from the company that hires them, it is invaluable as a collaboration tool. In effect, long-distance editorial notes and suggestions no longer have to be vague. It’s a gorgeous thing.
Other, Smaller Programs Featured
Adobe OnLocation is a fantastic video recording tool that, when hooked up to a recording camera and tuned correctly, records video in a legitimately awesome way, sorting and creating lists for the editor to dance about joyfully to. I have yet to use it professionally…perhaps I’ll experiment with it on “Stephen Priest.”
Contribute is a web program that a company could install on any of their employee’s computers, no matter what their experience with web design is. That person can then update web sites with information, blog posts, anything (as long as the site is programmed correctly from the start). It’s useful for people who don’t know web languages, but need to update sites with ease and speed and peace of mind. I’ve never used it, but I hear it’s fantastic.
Media Encoder is a lovely little program that Adobe began bundling with its suites, oh, about three years ago. Before this little wonder, whenever a program like After Effects or Premiere would export a video, the entire computer would lock up, and the choices were few and far between, and in no way could you customize how you wanted the final output to be. With Encoder, the editing programs now remain unlocked, and this baby take all the grunt-work, allowing nearly endless amounts of customizing. Exporting features for iPods and PSPs to Blu-Ray disks and cinema screens. Still pretty buggy, but each update stabilizes the thing.
* * *
So yes, I’m a gigantic geek. But in my opinion, geeking out about Adobe products is about as cool as a nerdy guy like me can get. Now you know my story, and my many opinions. There’s so much they offer, and I’ve only breached upon the surface use of each program. Get down and dirty, into the nuts and bolts of each program, and the possibilities become boundless.
Adobe is a strong company, and their priorities are in the right place. Each product they release is of excellence, extolling the effort placed into the little things. Keyboard shortcuts speed up your life, and they know it full well, and employ them every chance they get. Regular updates, for the most part, keep their programs fresh and glitch-free. They are a company that stands for excellence. And for that, I applaud them.
Congratulations, Adobe.
You rock.
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