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.

Adobe is giving an online preview for CS5 on April 12th at 11am EST. Anyone interested must register with their ‘Adobe ID’ or register to get one. The preview is free and they have limited spots so get yours ASAP! In the preview, you’ll get to see the ‘Mercury Playback Engine’ and the other new features in CS5. Check it out all out at Adobe’s launch site!

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H. Wolfgang Porter is a former US Naval Combat Cameraman who now produces independent films, published works and teaches video/photographic production.

We have gotten word that the official release date of Adobe Creative Suite 5 will be April 12, 2010.

What we can tell you about CS5 is the fact that the applications will be 64-bit only. CS5 also offers support for DSLR’s, which we see starting to gain a lot of traction in the filmmaking community! We can also say CS5 introduces the much anticipated Mercury Playback Engine which from our experience has made editing high resolution footage noticeably faster and tedious rendering a thing of the past.

We will keep you posted on all the details as they come in as well as a full review of Adobe Creative Suite 5.

In the mean time check out these Sneak Peak Videos of the Mercury Playback Engine!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De5N9IjUkNo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgcWrcVpZ8&feature

Adobe announces its latest additions to the Adobe Elements and Photoshop family today with it release of its consumer video editing program – Premiere Elements 8 and Photoshop 8. Adobe created Elements with the intent of reaching the consumer and hobbyist market with it’s low priced video editing software, but has moved the editing program along into a robust application that can keep pace with the big boys.

Rather than throwing in more effects you don’t need, this latest update has a lot more under the hood and has added some better tools to organize your video and photos.

What’s new? There’s an auto analyzer that you can use to tag your images for fast and easy searches. You can also sync your video and photos across several computers and the program has face recognition, helping to zone in on just the images you want from, say, “Carsen’s Birthday,” and it will learn who your subjects are and can find all images of them across the files.
Here’s some advance copy from our First Look review, to be uploaded Wednesday morning:
Premiere Elements 8 adds additional automated tools: Smart Trim removes the least interesting, lowest quality footage; SmartFix corrects shaky footage and color and lighting problems; and SmartMix balances music and sound effects without overpowering dialog or background audio. Plus, the new Motion Tracking feature finds moving subjects in your footage so that you can add graphics, text, and even video effects that automatically move with them.

Read the rest of our advance review of Adobe Elements 8.0 online here  http://www.videomaker.com/article/14751/

More From Adobe’s Press Release:
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 & Adobe Premiere Elements 8 software gives you power and ease of use so you can create extraordinary photos and incredible movies, easily manage and protect your photos and video clips with automatic online backup, and access them anywhere you are. And now, Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 & Adobe Premiere Elements 8 Plus includes everything in the award-winning software and more:
• 20GB of online storage—enough for up to 15,000 photos or four hours of DVD-quality video
• Ongoing delivery of new, easy-to-use tutorials
• Ongoing delivery of fresh seasonal artwork, inspiring templates, movie themes, video effects, and all-new Online Albums

It’s all accessible with your Adobe ID. For more details, visit www.adobe.com/go/membership_elements. Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 & Adobe Premiere Elements 8 Plus, $179.99 (Available on Adobe.com, U.S. only) A savings of $20 off the first year of Plus, if purchased with the software bundle.
Already have Photoshop Elements 8 & Adobe Premiere Elements 8? Upgrade to Plus via the product for $49.99 a year.

NVIDIA has just released it’s new Quadro CX graphics card. It’s been designed in conjunction with Adobe to specifically accelerate certain features of the recently announced CS4 suite. I attended an online demo yesterday and the technology involved looked very impressive.

The Quadro CX allowed very fluid interaction with your content in Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. Many of the simple tasks, such as resizing and rotation were instantaneous, and certain time consuming tasks such as h.264 encoding were greatly accelerated. The Quadro CX is squarely aimed at Adobe professionals, where time is money. We hope to get one in soon to test out for you.

The card itself has 1.5 Gigs of graphics memory and is priced at $1,999, and has drivers for both XP and Vista. A Mac version is currently “under discussion”.

You can read more details in the press release below:

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It’s been a busy time at Adobe lately, as they’ve released today new versions of just about every piece of software that they make. But for Videomaker readers, lets break down their new Creative Suite 4 Production Premium bundle, available in October for $1,699.

We managed to finagle a beta version of CS4, that we’ve been playing with for a while now and I’ll go through some of the new features of each part of the package below. But first off, a broad overview is in order. As you may have heard already, there’s been a shift to a new interface across the board for all apps. This common interface makes working in each individual program a lot easier, especially as most users might not be as savvy in one app, as they are in another.

Talking with Adobe about CS4 in a general sense revealed that this release was all about stability and work flow enhancements, rather than new features. That’s not to say there’s not anything new (I highlight these below), but I applaud the effort in refining the core usefulness of the programs. Many people make their living in Adobe applications, and solving work flow issues is by far more important on a day to day basis than the latest effect.

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