With Adobe’s latest production software bundle, Adobe Production Studio, the creative software company based in San Jose, CA, can finally claim a powerful tool that reaches beyond the lower-end user and into the high-end digital post domain.

‘[We’re going after] everybody,’ says Colin Smith, a senior applications developer based at Adobe’s Toronto office. ‘We’ve got support for everyone, from prosumers up to independent filmmakers.’

The December 2005 release of the Production Studio Premium edition includes the nonlinear editor Adobe Premiere Pro 2, compositing and FX app After Effects 7, audio editor Audition 2, DVD authoring program Encore 2, Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2.

A test run reveals a remodeled user interface across several apps that’s exponentially more intuitive, and an impressive array of highly integrated tools that may just induce some migration from Avid, and perhaps even woo some die-hard Mac Final Cut Pro users over to the PC side.

In fact, that’s exactly who the Adobe team is targeting with this next-generation production solution.

‘There are people [who are going to be] coming from Final Cut Pro and from Avid,’ says Smith. He adds that when the developers sat down to brainstorm, ‘We were measuring against the industry, and against our own technology and competing technologies. [We asked ourselves], ‘What’s out there? What are we missing? What are the critical holes?”

The Adobe team settled on a combination that leveraged its industry standard apps like After Effects and Photoshop, while incorporating important functional elements of the post process.

In the latest version, compositing, editing and DVD authoring (which you can even do within Premiere) are aligned with proprietary tools such as Adobe Dynamic Link – which creates live interaction between After Effects compositions and either Premiere Pro timelines or Encore projects, allowing users to see changes in realtime without rendering.

‘The Production Studio’s seamless integration of Premiere and After Effects creates a finishing toolbox that is more powerful and dynamic than Final Cut Pro,’ says Trent Hignell, post-production supervisor film production, Vancouver Film School, one of the first end users out of the gate to make the switch over from Apple. ‘Essentially, with Production Studio, a student’s imagination becomes his only limitation.’

Among the remarkable number of new features of the integrated suite is Clip Notes, which allows you to create a PDF with clips of your show imbedded. Anyone can then add comments to this file before sending them back.

Another attractive feature is linked palettes and windows, which can be scaled and placed by tugging one side of any connected box on the screen. For anyone who’s worked in a palette-driven program like After Effects or Final Cut Pro, the ability to manage all your open panels is a huge stress reducer.

Finally, Premiere Pro 2 has an improved color corrector tool and a multicam option – which allows you to edit up to four camera angles in realtime – a boon to a video editor working on everything from a dramatic show to a performance event with a challenging amount of coverage.

While independent filmmakers have used earlier versions of the Adobe post pipeline – such as the U.S. off-road race doc Dust to Glory – no major content producers have as yet aligned themselves with the latest bundle. But APS is ready for high-end users out of the box with built-in HD support, which means native support for the XENA HS realtime encoding card from AJA and capturing in full-resolution HD or SD.

Other options to get uncompressed HD footage through the pipeline are Blackmagic’s Dynamic Link card, the Bluefish HD Fury card and Matrox Axio. And the list of capture cards keeps growing.

Smith relates that Adobe did a presentation at CBC, where it ran uncompressed HD footage through Premiere Pro 2. ‘It blew them away,’ he says. So far, though, only academic institutions such as Sheridan and VFS have committed to HD in APS.

‘Our students are picking up on the new workflow quickly and intuitively,’ says VFS’ Hignell. ‘We’re currently discussing the architecture of a full HD curriculum that would be designed to take full advantage of the Adobe pipeline’s potential.’

Not only is APS ready for HD, Smith adds, but it’s also robust enough at 32-bit to cater to high-end users who need to build and work with FX in an HD environment and then integrate them back into an HD workflow. In short, if required, they can get HD resolution on all in-progress work.

‘We were at best 16-bit,’ says Smith. ‘Now we’ve got the full dynamic range of the high-end compositing machines.’

Just how high and far can the highly touted Production Suite take Adobe into the competitive post-production marketplace?

‘I’ve been with Adobe nine years and I’ve never said the word ‘film’ with [the first version of] Premiere because I’m not fooling myself,’ says Smith. ‘But Premiere Pro 2.0? Film? Yes. Definitely this is now within its realm.’

www.adobe.com

www.vfs.com