Adobe announced Premiere Elements 9 software for both Windows and Mac which is a first for the Mac platform.

Premiere Elements users can take advantage of an easy-to-use Organizer, which acts as a media management hub, where both video clips and still photos can be accessed in one convenient location. The software easily imports a variety of file types from different devices including the popular Flip Video camera and video from HDSLR cameras. Users can quickly find the best videos with the Auto-Analyzer that automatically tags the most interesting, highest quality video footage – eliminating the hassle of clicking through dozens of clips to find the great ones.

With Premiere Elements 9, users can create eye-catching videos in just minutes, easily fix audio problems, automatically trim away bad footage, stabilize shaky shots, and correct bad color and lighting. Once users select the footage they want, movies can be created instantly or enhanced with professional flair in just a few clicks or with simple drag and drop effects, like the Cartoon Effect, which turns any video into an animated feature. Optimized performance also makes editing and viewing smooth, even in HD. In addition, friends and family can experience an interactive DVD-like viewing experience on the Web or share directly to Facebook and YouTube via interactive albums.

For added convenience, now Adobe Premiere Elements 9 Windows and Mac users have the option to purchase Plus, which offers 20GB of storage for automatic online backup and sharing (up to 15,000 photos or four hours of DVD-quality video), as well as ongoing deliveries of creative extras sent directly to the desktop software.

Adobe Premiere Elements 9 for Windows and Mac is available now at www.adobe.com for $100.

Ever heard the saying “slow and steady wins the race?” While it’s great advice for those who are running marathons, it is just the opposite of the ideal experience for a motion graphic designer. When an artist is in that long sought creative “zone” of graphic design having to wait 5 or more seconds for an image to refresh can make the magic wear off in a hurry. I mean, would Picasso be a happy customer if every paint stroke took 5 seconds to show up on his canvas? I doubt it. For this very reason, it can be of utmost importance to know some tips on how to keep your program running smoothly during the entirety of your production.

After spending several years working with Adobe After Effects, I feel pretty confident in saying that the basic reasons for why the program can sometimes slow to a crawl will inevitably fall into one of three categories: hardware, software, and work flow. That being said, the best way to speed up After Effects is of course, a hardware upgrade. However, hardware upgrades can be incredibly expensive – not to mention time consuming. Instead, it can be a good idea to just upgrade the most important parts of your computer that give After Effects its speed. Let me be clear: a faster processor is always going to give you the biggest bump in speed but there are other pieces of hardware that can do a lot for your computer as well. Also, it is always best to have the newest version of Adobe’s software as each new update tends to give faster render times due to increased support of GPUs and more efficient coding. That being said, if you want longer previews in After Effects, you will want to buy more RAM. After Effects versions from CS4 and below can only recognize 4 gigabytes of RAM unless multiple copies of After Effects’ renderer are open using multiprocessing, so try and get at least 6 to 8 gigabytes of RAM in order to max out your RAM in After Effects and have a little left over for other applications that need to be open. Thankfully RAM prices are as good as they’ve ever been making it possible to buy 8 gigabytes of DDR3 1600 megahertz RAM package for only $175.00. Another piece of hardware that can really help you speed up After Effects is a couple of fast hard drives. By putting your footage to one fast HDD that your computer can read from while writing rendered files to another fast hard drive you will notice a faster playback and render time. If you have some money to burn, your best option will be to buy two solid state drives that attach to your computer’s PCI-e slots giving you potential read times of 80-260 megabytes per second and write times of 60-160 megabytes per second. If you don’t have cash like that to burn, them some high end 7,200 RPM hard disk drives should still speed up your After Effects compositing. With the introduction of After Effects CS5 and its Mercury Playback engine,  it’s now possible to get significantly faster render times by upgrading the GPU of your computer. It accelerates rendering, encoding, and opening of large projects. One of the best graphics cards you can get at this time is the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 or an ATI Sapphire Radeon HD 5970.

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One of the more mysterious aspects of video editing is the use of proxies. The very word can strike fear into even the most confident of video editors and make beginning editors decide to start a new career. However, with the onset of high bit rate HD video editing, proxies have become a necessary evil. Just recently while working on the newest how-to video on shooting reception videos, I decided I had enough. Previewing my Canon 1D Mark IV footage natively on the laptop I was working on was like watching molasses dripping into a bucket in the middle of a North Dakota winter. In other words, it was unbearably slow. As a result, I decided to go online and figure out this proxy editing thing once and for all. I already had some knowledge having gone through several forums and news stories on the subject, but never really figured I’d need to use it. Boy was I wrong. I mean, when waiting for Premiere to spit out even one frame of the 45 Megabit per second HD video is less preferable than watching Robin Williams play Popeye, you know something has to change.

My search led me to all sorts of places on the net, but eventually I found the best solution was using either MPEG Streamclip, Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder or Super to make quick proxy versions of my files and then rename them with the Bulk Rename Utility. In case you were wondering, the best encoding settings were either ProRes Proxy (if on a Mac), or H.264 at about 3-5 Mbps (on Windows). At that point, it was possible to edit with the proxies scaled to the size of the source footage. Even though I lost a little quality, I more than made up for it in saved time. Instead of waiting for hours for my footage to render, I was able to watch my edit in real time which is crucial in order to get a “feel” for the edit (and not get mind-numbingly bored). Once I was finished with my edit, I simply reconnected my footage with the original source footage and because it had the same timecode and video settings, I was able to render it without any hiccups. I’m not going to lie to you though. Even though this method saved me time and effort, it still required two programs and an awful lot of time, which really wasn’t cool. Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe announced today, Adobe Creative Suite 5, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Focusing on interactivity, performance and maximizing the impact of digital content and marketing campaigns across media and devices, the Creative Suite 5 product line brings exciting full version upgrades of flagship creative tools while delivering significant workflow enhancements to designers and developers. Featuring integration with online content and digital marketing measurement and optimization capabilities for the first time, Creative Suite 5 products include access to signature Omniture technologies, to capture, store and analyze information generated by Web sites and other sources. Additionally, a brand new component, Adobe Flash Catalyst, joins the Creative Suite, ushering in the ability to design interactive content without writing code and improve the collaborative process between designer and developer.

The Adobe CS5 product family also enables the creation of content and applications for the much anticipated releases of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2, which are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more immersive user experience.

The new lineup is headlined by Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection, which includes, in a single package, all of Adobe’s renowned Creative Suite tools, such as Photoshop CS5 , Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5. These tools are also available separately or in one of the five Creative Suite editions. The complete Creative Suite 5 lineup includes Creative Suite 5 Master Collection, Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Creative Suite 5 Web Premium, Creative Suite 5 Production Premium and Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, as well as 15 point products, associated technologies and integration with new Adobe CS Live Services.

“While Creative Suite 5 continues Adobe’s storied history of delivering astonishing new creative features, this release first and foremost addresses the challenges facing publishers and creatives worldwide—how to build profitable businesses around digital content,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “By coupling sophisticated online business analytics with dazzling creative tools, we’re ensuring that publishers, designers and marketers can create, deliver and optimize beautiful, high-impact digital experiences across media and devices.”

Design Without Boundaries:
More than 250 new features have been integrated into the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection. InDesign CS5 is powering the transition to digital publishing with new interactive documents and enhanced electronic reader device support. Image creation and editing get a boost in Photoshop CS5 with Refine Edge, which offers better edge detecting technology and masking results in less time. Photoshop CS5 also includes the ability to remove an image element and immediately replace the missing pixels with Content-Aware Fill. New stroke options allow Adobe Illustrator CS5 users to create strokes of variable widths and precisely adjust the width at any point along the stroke.

Work Faster with Greater Precision:
Engineering breakthroughs throughout Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection work together to dramatically improve performance. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are now native 64-bit applications on both Mac and Windows, allowing users to work more fluidly when working on high-resolution projects. The highly anticipated NVIDIA® GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine allows Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 users to open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD sequences in real time and play back complex projects without rendering. The revolutionary time-saving Roto Brush tool in After Effects helps users isolate moving foreground elements in a fraction of the normal time. In addition, Dreamweaver CS5 now supports popular content management systems Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, allowing designers to get accurate views of dynamic Web content from within the product.

Accelerate and Optimize Creative Workflows:
Adobe Creative Suite 5 products integrate with new Adobe CS Live, a set of five online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time and currently include Adobe BrowserLab, Adobe CS Review, Acrobat.com, Adobe Story and SiteCatalyst NetAverages from Omniture. Adobe CS Review enables online design reviews directly from Creative Suite 5 applications, while Adobe BrowserLab is an indispensable tool for testing Web site content across different browsers and operating systems. NetAverages provides Web usage data that helps reduce the guesswork early in the creative process when designing for Web and mobile. Adobe Story is a collaborative scriptwriting tool that improves production and post-production workflows in CS5 Production Premium. Access to Acrobat.com services, such as Adobe ConnectNow Web conferencing, is also included to enhance discussion and information exchange with colleagues and clients around the globe.

Create and Deliver to More Mobile Platforms:
Using Flash Professional CS5, designers and developers can create, test and deliver Web content across a wide range of mobile platforms and devices such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, smartbooks and other consumer electronics. Users can look forward to deploying content in the browser with Flash Player 10.1 and as a standalone application with AIR 2 when those planned products become available. In addition, users can now build AIR applications using the new Packager for iPhone tool preview, a component of Flash Professional CS5, which can be deployed on the iPhone and iPad (subject to Apple’s requirements and approval) with future device support planned for Android, BlackBerry and Palm webOS.

Pricing and Availability:
Adobe Creative Suite 5 products are scheduled to ship within 30 days, with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales. Estimated street price for the suites is expected to be US$2599 for Master Collection CS5, US$1899 for CS5 Design Premium, US$1799 for CS5 Web Premium, US$1699 for CS5 Production Premium and US$1299 for CS5 Design Standard. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are available.

Videomaker will be following this up with a full review of Adobe Creative Suite 5.