Adobe's Mighty Production Studio

By David Em

February 6, 2006

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Adobe's Production Studio suite brings an astonishing array of pro-quality video tools to the PC desktop. There's a $1199 Standard and a $1699 Premium bundle configuration, as well as a $2099 Video Bundle that includes Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Video Professional.

I tested the Premium edition that includes Premiere Pro 2 for video editing, Audition 2 for audio editing, After Effects 7 for video post-production, Encore DVD 2 for DVD authoring, plus Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2. After Effects 7, Photoshop CS 2, and Illustrator CS 2 work on both Mac and PC. The others are PC-only.

All these applications, with the exception of Photoshop and Illustrator, have been significantly upgraded with a slew of new features and a unified interface. A new Dynamic Link feature and universal integration of the Adobe Bridge media browser radically streamlines the interoperability between the individual programs, in essence converting the package into a multimedia "metaprogram."

Interface and Interoperability

For the first time, Adobe's managed to create a truly unified interface across a product suite. They've attempted it before with their CS line of 2D and web graphics apps, but each of the programs in that bundle still has idiosyncratic legacy interface elements.

Where Premiere has been developed in-house by Adobe for years, programs like After Effects and Audition were acquired from other developers, and so have had radically different looks and feels from other products in Adobe's lineup. Their interfaces have been retooled and unified in Production Studio, and the result is a giant step in the right direction.

The new interface paradigm is customizable. You can adjust the UI's overall brightness, a prerequisite for viewing video colors properly. Program elements can now be organized as tabbed palettes that can be grouped together or displayed individually. When expanded into interface panels, they can be resized, rearranged, and docked, radically reducing screen clutter.

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