Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium

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Dragging controls let you easily fade sound in and out, enhancing the volume by 3 decibels with one click. The Play Selected Frequencies Only box allows you to zero in on a problem area. Helpful tools include Remove a Sound, Auto Compose Score, and Create Loop. The Pitch & Timing dialog shows time stretch and shift sliders. You can produce multichannel, 5.1 surround-sound audio. Plus, Soundbooth offers thousands of royalty-free scores, not just loops, to play with, which should expand as Adobe offers users a software development kit.

Although Soundbooth is less intimidating than audio editors such as Audition or Ableton Live, it could be more intuitive. For instance, we had to squint to see the tiny icons for navigating waveforms and enhancing volume.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash
Photoshop CS3 Extended includes features for animators and video editors who want to render their work for After Effects. The new Movie Paint feature allows you to edit movie frames as you would with images in Photoshop. This version of Photoshop also incorporates a new Clone Source palette and Onion Skinning. New document profiles include default settings for various types of media, including those for video and the Web.

Integration with Illustrator streamlines vector animation. The Crop Area option in Illustrator lets you lets you draw a rectangle appropriate to the type of media you're creating, and then export it into After Effects.

After Effects can set cue points and use keyframes for cue points in Flash videos. You can batch render FLVs and preserve alpha channels in images when jumping between Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator. However, we wish that CS3 Production Premium included Dreamweaver. After Effects can recognize color management profiles from Photoshop. You can bring in a layer style, such as drop shadow from Photoshop, and AfterEffects will make it live.

Encore, Ultra, OnLocation
Among the applications we only briefly tested, Encore is relatively straightforward, as is Ultra CS3, which enables chroma-keying with background composites. During the recording process, OnLocation allows you to monitor levels and correct errors and inconsistencies that may be hard to spot from a camera alone. This application, which we did not test, also enables prerecording to capture something that happened up to 30 seconds before you pressed the Record button.

Used in tandem with Premiere Pro, OnLocation (formerly DVRack HD) enables you to capture digital and high-definition clips via FireWire to a Windows XP or Vista hard drive instead of to tape, eliminating the need to capture and import later.

Service and support
Adobe provides substantial book manuals for each of its applications, in addition to a quick workflow guide. Production Premium and the Master Collection also include exposure charts for shooting with OnLocation. We found Adobe's video tutorials more detailed than those provided by Apple for Final Cut Studio 2. Adobe also hosts free forums, where you can seek the wisdom of a crowd of users.

Getting Started help is free for 90 days after you first contact technical support. Costly paid support via telephone and e-mail comes in four tiers; at $175, Bronze guarantees one user a response time of four hours for five questions. At a colossal $1,200, Silver offers two users unlimited support for a year and guarantees a response within three hours. Gold and Platinum will cost corporate or enterprise users even more. However, as with Apple Final Cut, weekend support is limited--a major downside if you're racing to meet a deadline.

Conclusion
We were impressed by the range of tools and depth of integration throughout Adobe CS3 Production Premium, although its complexity sometimes made us want to scream "uncle." Although Adobe representatives claim they don't intend to lure legions of users away from Apple's popular Final Cut Studio 2, we suspect that Adobe CS3 Production Premium's well-stocked arsenal may tempt many creative types. Nevertheless, film professionals might prefer Final Cut Pro's appealing new open-format timeline and new color correction application. Adobe CS3 Production Premium is an excellent bundle for digital animators and editors, especially those who aren't wedded to Macs. But even users of Final Cut Pro will find plenty of features in AfterEffects that Apple software does not offer.

Unfortunately, this suite is expensive. That's not likely to be a problem for big companies, but individuals will have to choose carefully from among the six Creative Suite 3 editions (see chart below). It's a bit confusing if you want pieces of various editions without buying the entire $2,500 Master Collection. For instance, Production Premium includes Flash but not Dreamweaver or Fireworks for Web design. However, you can't find Premiere and AfterEffects in either the CS3 Web or Design packages.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium

Adobe Creative Suite 3 packages

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