Adobe Production Premium

THE ADOBE PRODUCTION PREMIUM

You can buy Premiere Pro in three different bundles.:

1. Premiere Pro with Encore and OnLocation.
The Production Premium - Premiere Pro, Encore, OnLocation, After Effects, Photoshop extended, Audition,Illustrator and Flash Pro.
3. The Master Collection - everything in the Production Premium and also Dreamweaver, InDesign, Contribute,  and FireWorks.

There are also upgrades available from previous versions. Both bundles work on Mac and PC.  If you buy the Production Premium 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 CS5.5

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 has a dynamic links to Adobe Audition - send a Premiere timeline to Audition then mix using the multitrack view and export the results back to Premiere Pro.

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.

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 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 just 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.

Audition

Audition is Adobe's sound editing program, making a return to the Production Studio with CS5.5 and replacing Adobe Audition (which did the same kind of things but with a simplified interface).  If After Effects is for making complex things with pictures, Audition is the same thing for sound.

 There is a “dynamic link” between Premiere Pro and Audition - you can send a Premiere timeline to audition and the software keeps all the audio edits intact.  Once finished you send the final mix back to Premiere Pro where it slots back into the timeline from where it started.

Why use Audition 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 Audition is light years ahead of the simple noise filter in Premiere, for example.

Noise reduction

Audition 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 Audition’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

Audition’s music abilities can take "loops" of sound and you can lay them out as a piece of music.  You can even take your own sounds and make them loopable.  Not as easy as the instant music creation of Soundbooth but still easier that actually writing music.

Lots of filters

There are a huge number of filters for tweaking, EQ, pitch shift, time stretch and more.

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.