Adobe has announced updates to much of their production software. New versions of After Effects, Premiere, Encore and Audition were announced, as part of something called the Production Studio. My thoughts after the jump.
First off, Adobe has a very annoying website. While I would rank them lower down the “annoyance scale” than folks like Dell or Sony – there’s a special bit of angst reserved in my heart for those two. But come on – links to a new product from your company homepage should not take me to the store to buy the product, they should take me to a page where I can learn why I should buy the production. And what is this, 2003? Navigating with drop downs and a “Go” button? C’mon.
That said, the new software looks like a pretty major leap forward for Adobe. It appears they’ve gotten serious about their interface design, and I must say it looks a lot better, if not a bit too similar to another product. They’re obviously taking Premiere Pro more seriously as a competitor to Final Cut Pro and Avid. They’ve added proper support for uncompressed formats, native HDV support, multicam cutting and an abundance of other features.
As someone who has supported Premiere in the past, I can only hope the updates are as serious as they look to be. The thought of cutting 4k in Premiere is enough to terrify little children, but I won’t judge until I’ve actually seen it.
The updates to After Effects look a bit more incremental, though the new interface is again, a major plus. It doesn’t look like it’s a Universal Binary (Apple likes to capitalize that phrase…) on the mac, but that’s not particularly surprising.
Both products are advertising Macromedia FLV export support, presumably to remind us that they bought Macromedia. It’s a good thing though – FLV is a great “quick and dirty” video delivery format. Of course, Flash already comes with the exporter and you need Flash to do useful things with the FLV, but hey …
All in all, I think it’s a pretty significant update. I look forward to learning more.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t personally think that the updates to Premiere put it on par with FCP and Avid. Just saying that it’s getting closer…