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Flash CS3 REVIEW
One of the biggest differences between macromedia and Adobe has always been the quality of the application. Previous versions of Flash for instance always seemed buggy and many times would crash without apparent cause. When Adobe purchased macromedia many of us rejoiced as we hoped for the same level of design and quality assurance to be entrenched in Flash that has come to be expected in Photoshop or Illustrator. We hoped and we got what we wanted… well closer to what we wanted.
Although the latest version of Flash is a great improvement it still doesn’t feel like Adobe but rather simply Adobe influenced. The drawing tools are far superior but still feel a little wonky in comparison to Illustrator or even the vector drawing tools in Photoshop which are now much closer to illustrator. I realize Flash isn’t illustrator and we can import graphics from illustrator to Flash so why not just do that… well as many have realized, many times you can’t. I’ve often created vector-based objects in Illustrator, tried to import them every way imaginable only to have to reproduce some piece of it in Flash.
The positive of reproducing the images in Flash however, is that because the drawing tools are far better now in comparison, reproducing the illustration is much easier and seemingly works better in the animation and is far, far easier to edit later. So why didn’t adobe fully adopt the drawing tools purely from illustrator? It probably has something to do with freehand users who are used to their drawing tools, who are used to the flash tools and who may not know what’s best for them. But overall though they likely needed to keep something there for everyone as well as work with the current application that they have rather than build it from scratch… because there’s no way we would have waited for a completed revamped release.
As far as other idiosyncrasies, I still render drop shadows either with a transparent PNG under my vector or by softening and filling edges under shapes. The blur thing that is currently there just doesn’t cut it. I try it every so often only to be confused. SO, if Adobe could create a nice little vector blur tool similar to what we have in Illustrator or Photoshop that would be ideal or at very least somehow copy the work flow to be consistent. But again maybe this blur thing that is currently there is what freehand people are use to. Poor buggers…
Now the absolute plus has got to be the ability to work with the improved video tools. Video has come a long way especially now with being able to export video with transparency. This makes things so much easier… now if every users plugin would simply catch up we’d all be set so we could stop using transparent PNG animations as opposed to video. But that’s a client education thing not the fault of Flash of course.
Overall though it’s the best version of Flash yet but still it pales slightly to the excitement I felt when first using Flash 5 over the release of version 4. Of course I was in New York at a Flash Forward conference and everything looked great on that day .
After Effects 7 REVIEW
The must have software in any serious visual composition studio, AE7 is the workhorse of the post production toolbox. Anything from ads to cinema, this is an upgrade that will be walking in the door of a lot of studios with a high end talent pool.
For those who have any CS3 product, you wont need to listen to me go on about the new interface with dockable palettes. For those that are not there yet, suffice to say that now, better than ever Adobe products, including AE7 allow for easy docking of palettes and workspace management.
Two big draws to those familiar with AE is it’s recognition of more powerful graphics cards and the change to how you use the graph editor.
With more powerful than ever cards out there fitting in the budget of the professional without taking out another loan, AE7 is now able to turn out a quicker production environment when dealing with previews and responsive composition. The Open-GL rendering engine noticeably affects performance when using it. Be careful though – your graphics card may not support this, but then again if it doesn’t your due for a card upgrade anyway.
Graph editor. What can one say about the earlier versions. Before you knew it you could be neck deep in them. Now you can toggle from the timeline to a full graph view showing the layer animation and effects properties in curves – and as for as many curves as you seemingly want – all colour coded.
You no longer have to deal with many key frames by adding them where you start and stop effects. With the graph editor you can manage many effects without the use of key frames with the tool that bears resemblance to the free transform tool from Photoshop.
The main caveat with the product that can be seen would be the (not with standing the focus on Open GL 2.0 hardware acceleration) lack of progress done on the 3D rendering modules. Reelections and real time bitmapping/ant aliasing just are not up to snuff yet.
This release is a definite upgrade none the less, with the key enhancements mentioned above. The graph editor alone will allow you to pay for this product quick enough through increased productivity. Actually that is probably the most important feature of AE7. No real stingers to easily identify, but it is faster, easier and a departure from the previous releases. No doubt the integration of Adobe and Macromedia played some role in the divestiture of the legacy annoyances that are gone.
Speaking of Macromedia and legacy – AE7 can output alpha transparent video directly to the Flash FLV format. Sweet! Before this you had to do that quick step of outputting to ai or mov then using Flash to encode that file to FLV. That all took up time (and space since you probably would want that output saved too). The encoder output is a bit slower but overall quicker than doing the aforementioned quickstep. The encoder does not allow for cue points, so this may not be a big thing if you use them. Sorry you will still have to make a mov file and add the cues.
Some of the noted highlights in this round are:
• 32-bit colour support allows a wider range of stills for import.
• Utilizing the graphics card for more processing power rather than the CPU.
• New presets for behaviors, text animation, effects and transitions and backgrounds
• A new graphing editor that can be viewed by toggling from track to graph view – allowing as many curves to share the display area
• Complete project templates that can be used to create bumpers, credit rolls and DVD menus
• HDV video files support
• Continuously Rasterize allows for vector view of Illustrator files
This is a product for those who are in the visual composition profession - regardless of media platform (web/tv/film/drive-in).
InDesign CS2 REVIEW
InDesign CS2is a major step forward for Adobe to tackle one of it's main current rivals, Quark.
With all the new features in this version, the "must-have" is making inroads in the layout community and doing a good job of swaying folks away from the "Quark side".
I suspect that Quark will or has responded to the developments in InDesign by ramping production and updates to meet the match, but am not a big user of Quark, so please forgive me on any ignorance.
So what are the four big things that I see?
Drag and Drop and Anchor
Sounds like a new cocktail. Maybe it should be to celebrate the ability to do those actions with text in the context of moving around paragraphs, layout views, story editor windows and more. Got that email I sent? Drag the text from the email, webpage or Word into your ID text frame. Make sure you select your english (fellow Canadians) as the option for the spell check will correct things for you. Yes it is colour not color. It does not however want to control your life like word and is easily turned off. As for the anchoring - you can anchor an object to where you want it in the text frame. If the frame moves, the anchored object is going to move just like it would if there were two layers in Photoshop locked to each other. Amazing, but so simple this should have been in there long ago, but alas it is.
Photoshop Layer Management
So you have a layout and not sure about what image looks best. Just put them all in a PSD file on separate layers and save. Now ID allows you to use the PSD to view what looks best by show and hide layer on the file. Now you can have just one layere PSD instead of multiple Tiffs and ID layouts. Quark does not support transparency from what I am told like ID does. Illustrator files will have to be saved to a PDF 1.6 file and include the layers at this point...maybe something for the next round.
Snippets
For those who use Dreamweaver, then you know how important this is. Snippets are small xml files that allow you to save objects such as text blocks, graphics, tables etc, that can be used later on in another issue or project to maintin consistency and reduce repetition. You can select something to make into a snippet and then drag to location to save or export the file to send to someone in an email. Since the xml is small its not a big issue. Save space on your HD and archive the old projects by just saving the things you will want for other times. When called, a snippet reappears in the same place as it was saved on the ID page with all the thumbnail, font and colour meta data still in place.
Duely Noted:
• Adobe Bridge
• Object Styles palette: preserve and apply strokes, drop shadows, and fill to be consist throughout a document by using styled objects.
• Microsoft Word import: well sometimes you just have to use that when a copywriter has no other option. Catch the copywriter's spelling errors, and even include shapes that transfer to shape (take a note Flash) from the Word doc.
• Export multiple pages as separate jpg image files.
• Take a multi page pdf and replace pages (select what pages or select all).
• Font preview - the actual thing is represented.
• XML support is increased - as mentioned - but so good I have to note it again.
Adobe Studio 8
Now that Macromedia is within Adobe, it is nice to see that Photoshop can come bundled with Studio. However on it's own, Studio 8 is a power to reckon with. This is one package that is the star of the field. Microsoft seems to think it can produce something close, but forget it.
Studio comes packaged with Dreamweaver (see review below), Flash, Flash Paper, Contribute and Fireworks.
For those who see the end for Freehand as it is not in this package, the inclusion of Contribute over it makes sense. After all Fireworks and Flash both have great drawing tools and this is a screen, not a print orientated package so the switch makes sense.
Flash integration with video shines through on this release with the inclusion of better video handling and the addition of the Flash Video Encoder. Flash is also now able to produce content for mobile devices, and comes with a slew of template that allow you to start out.
The simple mode is back, albiet in a different form, in the new Flash. Thanks for that!
The cross integration between programs works great. If your going to edit an image that you have in place on a page, it will move back and forth easily between programs without crashing.
So seemless and neccessary is this update, if you are still in MX or MX2004, just like an old pair of pants, you may be comfortable, but when you get the new one, you will wonder why you didn't get it sooner.
Adobe Dreamweaver 8
As a stand alone product, this is by far the best for managing websites. So you "code by hand" . Good for you. Welcome to 1995. This software lets you manage a site, create, strip bad Word code, integrate with databases and also works seemlessly with Cold Fusion and ASP backends.
The best thing about this release is for those who manage rich emails. To produce them, you must refer to images by the full url. In the past, DW could not render them in the program unless they were local. Now it can call images from online servers and let you see exactly how the design, and proper code will handle it.
As for the shiner on this. It has to be hands down CSS management. There is now no excuse for any professional to not use CSS sheets. Lately I have seen sites with the styles in each page. That is pointless folks. You must create one sheet/file so that you can affect changes sitewide, not on each page. That is the reason DW has the CSS management features. Nice to have the ability to put it on the page, but should default to creating a file, not css within the page your working on.
Other long time wishes fulfilled are the background posting of files (you dont have to wait to continue building during FTP), zooming of the pages and a quick show tables.
I have not had any crashes on DW since the latest update.
If you are a designer or programmer, you must get this to work effectively.
Adobe Premier Elements 2.0
There are two types of software out there from where I sit. The professional stuff like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Premier, and the little cousins for people who are not graphic and new media professionals. In this case, Premier Elements is the smaller (and cheaper version) to the heavy lifting Premier. The aim of this versioning is to appeal to those who do not have the time, inclination, need or understanding to use a full blown editing suite.
Elements (as we will refer to it in this review), does a good job at bringing consumers close to their digital movie files. With the explosion of DVD and hard drive video cams, this is going to go a long way to help edit those home movies. Lets face it, windows xp home movie maker sucks and rarely is there a decent editing (or dvd creation - thats for another day) tool included in the camera.
Elements is by far the best solution for those who want to simply edit simple movies in a simple way on a windows system. Design is easy to use and the interface hardly requires the handsome and handy pull out card included in the small box. Speaking of, its nice to see small boxed software though it could have just as easily have fit in a dvd case which is what happened to this once it was opened (make note Adobe!).
Elements should come with a warning to consumers. Everyone thinks stuff is immediate. With its real time preview, elements allows one to see how the project is coming together, but there will still be rendering time issues based on the speed of the machine. Help is close at hand on all issue as long as you have a connection, which is handy, but I still am one for paper - none shipped with my copy. The tutorials are simple, step by step and also have a link to the local output file from each project.
The smartest thing I have seen in a while. A simple green button that says "Add Media". One of the primary functions that you got Elements for is right in front of you. With fully editable palatte layout and the usual workspace management that Adobe is great at, it makes it a breeze. Drop the imported media to the timeline and you automatically get an update (again dependant on system speed) of the chapters in the clip.
Burning the final project is fine for those who will accept the templates that come with Elements. Like most consumer software, you can edit the titles etc, but to create a really personal and custom interface, you will need something with more kick like Encore. Still this suites me just fine to do the editing end of the project - exporting to MPEG, Quicktime or WMF.
Caveats? Well the add media defaults in windows to my username folder rather than My DVD folder, or the last folder I was in when relaunch it. Also, the drag and drop of files failed sometimes, but hey thats a Microsoft thing I suspect.
Overall Rating: 5/5. Full marks for ease, use and of course the price! Suggested retail price for Adobe Premiere Elements is $99 USD.
