You can buy Premiere Pro in two different bundles.:

1) Premiere Pro with Encore and OnLocation.

2) The Production Studio Premium - Premiere Pro, Encore, OnLocation, After Effects, Photoshop extended, Soundbooth,Illustrator and Flash Pro.

There are also upgrades available from previous versions. Both bundles work on Mac and PC.  If you buy the Studio then apart from the individual programs you also get the Adobe Dynamic Link which lets you easily transfer data from one to another.

What programs are included in the Production Studio?

Adobe Premiere Pro 4

Adobe's editing program.  If you want to read full details concerning Adobe Premiere click here.

Premiere has a dynamic link to After Effects - quickly send part or all of a Premiere timeline to After Effects and then send the results back to Premiere without rendering.  Once the link is established you can update your composition in After Effects and it is instantly updated in Premiere.  Premiere also dynamic links to Adobe Soundbooth - drop a Premiere timeline into Soundbooth and then add a multitrack audio mix.  When you re-edit the timeline in Premiere the Soundbooth project is automatically updated.

Photoshop Extended

The latest version of Adobe Photoshop with support for video and good integration with After Effects and Premiere Pro.  Photoshop is great for customising Encore DVD menus, and with the extended version tools like the healing brush can suddenly be used on video as well as still images.

Illustrator

Adobe’s drawing program. Where Photoshop makes images from pixels that become huge squares when you zoom in, Illustrator makes vector based drawings which stay sharp at any zoom level. Illustrator files can be taken into After Effects and then animated easily, so its a great way for creating logos for video.

Flash Pro

Flash is one of the best ways to get video on the Internet as it is supported by Mac and PC and is used everywhere. You can encode to Flash from Premiere Pro but if you do so you just create a piece of video.  To get this video onto the internet you need to put a web page around it.  Flash Pro goes a lot further - you can create animated webpages with links to video, and also created animated video clips with embedded links which are triggered as they are played.  If you need to something beyond just producing a piece of video that plays, then use Flash Pro.  There is a dynamic link to After Effects so you can take a complex composite from AE and put it straight into Flash Pro for adding Flash items.

After Effects

It is impossible to do justice to Adobe’s compositing program in a small half page box, so we won’t even try.

After Effects is used for broadcasters all over the world. It has a huge list of features including being able to motion track objects so you can pin effects to them; rotoscoping so that you can draw a matte around an object and remove it from a scene; painting and animating of painted objects; 3D cameras so you can fly around objects and logos; a huge list of effects and a lot more.

The quality of rendering is also superior. We made a tutorial DVD using Adobe Premiere and the results were good. We then opened that project in After Effects re-rendered it and the quality was a lot better.

After Effects has a lot of features - this may make it daunting for new users. So Adobe have added a lot or ways to help you achieve results easily. There are a lot of pre-made templates and scenes and features like “brainstorming” mean you add a few effects and let After Effects make some variations for you.
As long as you buy it as part of the Production Studio Premium you also get the Adobe Dynamic link - take footage from Premiere and copy it straight into After Effects and then put the After Effects composition on the Premiere timeline without rendering. Any updates are then automatically seen in Premiere - a great time saver.

A lot of After Effects is also very similar to Adobe Premiere - the timeline of After Effects is list like the Premiere Effects control window (since the Premiere window was designed that way). A large list of presets which you can browse and reuse easily also helps you to get into the program.

Even if all you use is the animated titles it is worth adding After Effects to your arsenal.  With older versions there were two different varieties of After Effects - Standard and Pro.  These days there is only one - equivalent to the old Pro version.

Click here to read more about After Effects.

Soundbooth

Soundbooth’s aim is to provide and easy to use method of improving and tweaking the sound in your videos. It can edit single and multitrack clips - mixing several clips together to produce one sound track.  You can just click on a clip in Premiere and open it in Soundbooth. Make the changes and Premiere is automatically updated.

You can also set a “dynamic link” in the other directions. Open a Premiere project in Soundbooth and add sound effects and music. Change the edit in Premiere and it is updated in Soundbooth.

Why use Soundbooth to do audio effects you could achieve in Premiere?

Because you can take them a step further and the quality is better. The noise reduction in Soundbooth would be a real struggle to add to Premiere, for example.

Multitrack & Adobe snd files

Soundbooth now does multitrack editing, much like Audition which it replaced in the suite, which means you can do a proper audio mix inside of Soundbooth. This is saved in a new file format developed by Adobe, as “snd” files, which is the sound equivalent of a Photoshop file. Unlike Premiere where the timeline is just a selection of references to the original clips Soundbooth’s multitrack copies the files you load into the file. Use a clip twice and it is copied into the file twice, make a change to the original after you have brought it into Soundbooth and it will not change in Soundbooth.

Normalise many audio clips

Drag several clips into Soundbooth and make it match the levels between all of them automatically..

Noise reduction

Soundbooth has several tools to improve the quality of your sound. Sample a sound, like a microphone buzz, and remove this sound through the entire file. Or use Soundbooth’s spectral view to isolate and lasso a sound and then remove just that sound from a clip - select the screech of a seagull or the creak of a door and just remove that whilst leaving the rest of the sound intact.

Music creation

Soundbooth’s music abilities are not for budding Mozarts looking to compose a stunning score, its for the average editor who needs a reasonable piece of music that fits his video.

Speech transcription

Speech Transcription is available in both Premiere and Soundbooth. Select a clip the program will transcribe the speech to text. You can then search the text for various phrases and it jumps to that part of the clip. This feature works reasonably well on our test footage although how it will deal with various accents UK will prove interesting. Adobe supply different speech models such as “international English”, French etc.
If the speech is not too fast and quite clear it tended to not get transcribed very well.
However even if not 100% correct it will be good for searching for phrases. This is the first version of Adobe’s speech transcriber so it can only get more accurate the more Adobe develop it.

OnLocation

The point of OnLocation is to help you film better in the first place. It works with either HDV or DV through FireWire.  As you film you record on to the computer as well as you camera. As the computer buffers the video as it comes in it can record for up to 40 seconds before you press the record button!

As you record you can add notes, which will appear as Metadata in Premiere. You can take a frame when filming and overlay it on the live video for continuity purposes and it has tools to help to get better focus and exposure.

OnLocation can do stop motion capture and time-lapse as well as motion triggered capture. Its a great capture tool to help you get the best footage recorded in the first place and avoid lots of post production.