Best Editing Software: Adobe Production Premium Creative Suite 6 – Editing Suite

Adobe you know, what you’re waiting on is CS6 and rightly so, it will be a very strong presence in the video editing world for good reason, such as a clean and easy to use interface and good utilization of 64-bit processing. The suite combines big names like Premiere, Audition, Photoshop and After Effects with many more for a package that gives video professionals and enthusiasts an extensive group of tools.

Their emphasis this time around is to speed up your editing, allowing for hover scrubbing within windows, better/more intuitive performance in Audition and uninterrupted playback in Premiere. Another welcome expansion will be found in multicam editing and color correcting. There’s plenty more new features to discover, and as for pricing, we can’t be sure, but to get into the ballpark, CS5.5 is $1,700 and upgrades are about $400.

If you’ve ever tried to model realistic 3D objects before, then you probably know just how agonizingly hard the process can be. Just trying to get simple things like lights to fall correctly on objects can be enough to make your hair go gray. If that’s not enough punishment, trying to animate those objects with a good degree of realism can suck every last bit of fun from any 3D project you have. For those of us with little experience in 3D applications it can seem as if scaling Mt. Everest would be less daunting a task than modeling and animating realistic plants, animals, and objects in 3D. As a result, I’m sure many of us who have some experience modeling and animating have at one point asked the age old question: “Isn’t there an easier way?”

The good news is that there are options that can help us gain back whatever part of our lives (and minds) that we lost to modeling and animating in 3D. The simplest option is to stitch together a series of photographs to make a 3D model out of a real life texture. This is by far the preferred way to model since pictures allow for more ideal shooting conditions, higher resolutions, and larger dynamic range than most video cameras are capable of. This leads to a crisper and more scalable texture for the model that you end up with. Plus, using photographs means that lighting will be taken care of, freeing up a tremendous amount of time. Check out the kinds of software available after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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