Adobe Production Studio Premium (Upgrade from Premiere Pro, Photoshop, or After Effects Pro)

List Price: $1,249.00

Features:

• Create editable and scalable vector artwork for your film, video, and web productions, now with advanced painting, drawing, and type tools
• Eliminate rendering with Adobe Dynamic Link (only in Production Studio)
• Unified design environment for higher productivity -- get up to speed quickly and work more efficiently
• Organize and browse content files,from Adobe Bridge into your film, video, audio, and DVD productions
• All-in-one toolset for professional audio production, including looping and audio restoration capabilities

Accessories:
PC World	ColorVision Spyder2PRO Win/Mac	ColorVision Spyder2 Suite Win/Mac

Customer Reviews:

This program or should I say this group of programs is so cool. It's a must buy! [Posted on 2006-02-07]
If you're reading this. You are thinking about dropping some serious cash so I will try and help you out!

If you're trying to decide between this, which is Adobe production studio premium or the Standard Edition do not buy The Standard Edition, you get so much more with this version, I repeat do not buy the Standard Edition.

You're probably interested in getting the Adobe production studio premium edition. I have to tell you, this is a great product, the dynamic link is such an amazing feature a links together. Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe encore, seamlessly. You can take Adobe After Effects compositions into premiere Pro without rendering. Then if you need to edit the composition you just pop back into after effects, tweak it adjust it pop back into premiere and is automatically updated. It is just an amazing thing to see it in action.

After effects has got a total facelift, along with encore audition and premiere Pro. Gone is the "palette-tosis" of the old programs. Where you would lose palettes have palettes on top of palettes not know where to find a palette. The new facelift is totally awesome.

Stability: I've been using these programs for few days, and they are totally stable. One crash, I think I had and I think was my fault. Adobe encore, I feel is the best improvements from the old version making a DVD with the new flowchart is so amazingly simple.

Adobe After Effects 7.0
after effects is the bomb is you such an amazing program. Once you get past the user interface and learn some of the nuances you can do almost anything and mean anything with video is awesome. 7.0 has the ton of user presets. The text effects are great. The backgrounds that you can create that come as presets, all editable. A cool thing is with a new user presets, you can see them actually preview and Adobe Bridge. This is cool!

Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
this program now is more in line with user interface from premiere elements. The one thing I really enjoy now about from your Pro 2.0. Is that I can import MPEG files from my replay TV and edit them. This is something that was sorely lacking in from your Pro 1.5 user interfaces been revamped in the new style. He just feels a lot cleaner smoother and more stable.

Adobe audition 2.0
this program, I think has gotten the most drastic user interface upgrade. I'm not really in the audio is what don't really know what under the hood is changed. I do know it's got ASIO drivers now. That is a big deal if you're an audio. But now the user interface is more in line with all the other a video products. Was nice about audition now is that if you have a audiophile in premiere Pro 2.0. You can now send it to audition, change it or modify it save it and it brings it back right into premiere. No reimporting, that is so cool.

Adobe encore 2.0
if you're wondering about Adobe encore this upgrade is nice. The automatic slideshow creator, while only limited to 99 photos per slideshow is a nice feature. I'd use it already. There are some limitations in the slideshow creator like again, only 99 photos per slideshow but you could link unlimited slideshows back to back to back, but you're still limited to 99. In each slideshow. Stability I feel in this program is vastly improved the old encore. I was so like I was teetering on the edge of losing my whole project. I feel of it safer and encore 2.0. It has a ton more templates is integration with Adobe Photoshop and with Adobe After effects is amazing. You will love it!

Adobe Bridge 1.0
this program is quirky. It crashed about 20 times. It has the potential to be really great, but it's good takes a more time to get there. Building of this program as your media manager. Again, it's not there yet. I'm still using Adobe Photoshop elements, the tagging portion to organize my digital photographs.

Adobe dynamic link
this program really isn't a program, but it is a program. If you know and mean? Basically dynamic link links together all of the applications in the production studio. Now the hitch is you can't get this if you buy the program separately. So to see it in action, you have to buy the production studio. Another reason why you should invest. But once you have it up and running. You will be amazed. It simplifies workflow drastically one place all this in action I bought it enough said.

So there you have it my micromini review of Adobe production studio premium. Something to keep in mind, this does come with a disk of totaltraining that reviews each of the programs give you some of the new features it about two hours. Not really great but it's free. When you install it the first time. You wanna register online seeing a free plug-in are a couple templates that they offer you if you miss this opportunity the first time you install it. You will not get another chance I believe, so make sure you register.

This install comes on five DVDs income of five gigs of loops for Adobe audition, a bunch of DVD templates, and other goodies.

Another thing to note, you will not be old to upgrade individual programs. Once you buy the production studio. So this means that if a new version of Photoshop CS3 comes out. You will have to wait to upgrade the production studio. You can't upgrade individual products. This kind of rots but I guess you gotta deal.

This does have online activation

That's all I can think of at the moment, if I think of anything more. I'll update this review. Go to Adobe's web site and download the program demos. The one thing you won't get is dynamic link so you'll have to use your imagination and see how it will fit in. Also check out the creative cow (dot) com.

With the production studio, you also get Adobe Photoshop CS2 in Adobe Illustrator CS2. That is a huge bonus.

Have some fun and get it done

0 for licensing and tech support [Posted on 2006-02-09]
Beware of Adobe's licensing. The studio comes with one serial number for all the included software, which means that you cannot use its individual components as standalone products. So if you want to install Photoshop and Illustrator on one desktop, and Premiere and After Effects on another, you are out of luck.

Also, Adobe's customer support is incredibly incompetent. I had to call Adobe three times over the course of three days before I was told that this was the case! They don't seem to know basic things about their product line, for example, that Production Studio is a Windows-only product. To make things worse, the first representative told me to delete all of the Adobe licensing files from my computer to solve the activation issue, and then use the `repair' option on a re-install, after which I was supposed to have been able to activate the software over the internet. There is no repair option on the re-install, deleting the licensing files didn't solve the activation issue, and instead forced me to re-install the entire Production Studio and the Creative Suite 2, which was also installed on the same computer! The second representative told me that he would transfer my case to the `tech support,' who would call me back on the same day, and who never did. On the third day, I was finally told that I simply cannot use individual components as standalone products. So whether you install only Photoshop, or the whole suite, from the activation point of view both count as one complete installation. I feel that Adobe needs to make this point very clear to their customers. Had I known this, I would have chosen a completely different way to upgrade my software.

Great if you don't need DVD authoring [Posted on 2006-06-12]
All the applications in the suite are fantastic with one exception: EncoreDVD. This piece of software is full of bugs and inexplicable system errors. I have never been able to complete one project. Every time, my project gets corrupted for no reason and then need to be rebuilt from scratch. If you don't believe me, please visit the Adobe User Forum and read through all the messages from users crying for help with program and system errors. If you plan on authoring DVDs, you will probably have to do like me: buy another application such as DVDit.

Excellent Digital Swiss Army Knife for PC media [Posted on 2007-01-04]
I have used Adobe products on PC for about 5 years now, and would highly recommend them to anyone that needs to do non-trivial work on illustrations, images and video.

First off, be aware that all the full-blown Adobe apps have a reasonable learning curve. This edition contains essential (and excellent) PC-based DVD learning tools that demonstrate how to start to use the powerful tools in this suite. After that, other books can be helpful, and the Internet, particularly Creative Cow, is essential to understand more advanced topics. Do not expect the simplicity found in the Elements series of Adobe, or its competitors. This is a suite of heavy-duty and still somewhat idiosyncratic, tools. But boy do they work when/if you give them your attention! There is nothing wrong with simplicity and if all you want is the equivalent of a point-and-shoot camera, by all means go that way instead. These tools are the equivalent of Digital SLRs instead. In addition, although the interfaces are getting more similar, they are not yet even intuitive cross-product, and they are all not based on standard Windows metaphors. You will be frustrated if you expect them to be.

As to the tools, I don't need to introduce PhotoShop CS, I expect - it is THE standard image editor (at least on PC). Fewer people outside graphic arts know about Illustrator CS - but it is a fine vector graphics tool - if little improved over its predecessors in this version. At this stage in its history, I would expect it will be folded into Photoshop soon. The line between vector and pixel image tooling is now more of historical artifact than something people should have to wrestle with IMHO. Yes vectors are great at preserving details, edges and handling scaling better than pixel-based editing, but why couldn't those aspects be incorporated into equivalent Photoshop tools? But currently if you have to do artwork that can be rendered at different sizes (logos, promotional material, etc) Illustrator is the way to go.

Premiere Pro CS is now an easier video editor to use than ever (still more complex and feature packed than entry-level editors however). It has superior control of video cameras (but has only simplistic support for MPEG input, and none for most HD cams built in). It has wonderful new tooling, interface improvements and has some After Effects effects built-in so you don't have to export and import for common needs. Its DVD support is simple, but you will be using Encore for that from this package. The audio editing capabilities are much improved within the tool.

After Effects CS is the Production version (must have) with 3D effects and other important features that you need to make killer adverts, intros, animations and so on. The real power with this product is the use of Javascript to control the effects, allowing for very sophisticated, natural-looking results. But it takes time to learn!

Audition is a very useful, non-destructive, multi-track, audio editor. You can build compositions with its loops (or ones you can buy) or do complex editing (although I would still recommend Sony SoundForge for real heavy-duty work on sound other than looping).

Encore is now on its second version and is getting very slick. DVD production is an artform due to the non-open way the menus and flow are coded and the need to cram all that data into that small space. Encore is feature-rich enough to allow for more sophisticated DVDs than I have been able to get done elsewhere, flexible enough to allow for external encoding of material, including menu creation in Photoshop, but safe enough to ensure that the DVD isn't likely to be a dud (unless your media or burner has problems). Building DVDs from MPEG source material remains a chore with Premiere and Encore (you basically have to expand the MPEG to AVI during editing one way or another and then re-encode it) but by leaving the encoding late in the cycle (inside Encore) you can at least ensure that chapter points are exactly where they should be. The encoding support in the Encore product is superior quality in my experience as well including Dolby encoding for sound. Basically it works well enough, but as HDD cams and DVD cams increase market share, Adobe needs to upgrade to encompass real MPEG editing with fast-pathed encoding. You can buy a very expensive add-on from a third party to do this - but there is no excuse now for this not being in the Premiere/Encore products.

Finally the package is held together with Bridge - which to me is the weakest part of the package. Bridge doesn't quite seem able to be as good at organizing media as Photo Album was, and doesn't seem as seamless a way of moving between apps in a creative workflow as I would have expected. This may be because I just haven't understood it yet, but I am not convinced that this feature doesn't need a rethink.

You also get a full set of hard manuals which is nice, but I find I rarely use.

Please be aware that the Suite is licensed by using a single license based on the Photoshop CS scheme - so all these tools are to be installed on one computer at a time. Also, once Adobe bought Macromedia they now have a big non-profit and educational discount, so please check that out if you are eligible.

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