09.23.08

Adobe CS4 Release

Adobe has announced a new version of its flagship product line, Creative Suite 4. The suite boasts more seamless integration between applications as well as a whole slew of new features that will no doubt change our workflow over the coming months. A few features--AIR integration, Dynamic Link, improved Device Central, and Connect Now, which allows users to share their screen from within an application--are available across multiple applications, while individual apps have seen significant overhauls as well. Hopefully the apps will load faster too, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

As with CS3, the suite comes in a variety of different flavors for designers, web developers and video professionals. As a company that uses pretty much the entire suite, we’ll no doubt be looking to upgrade our Master Collections. With Production Premium users can benefit from a renderless workflow, easily bouncing between After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth and back again via Dynamic Link. The Web Premium suite boasts richer integration between designers and developers, as well as a number of nifty prototyping and collaboration tools. Design Premium also allows for much more seamless integration between the company’s flagship design tools, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

Some of the more impressive individual product features I noticed (but not a comprehensive list by any stretch of the word) are as follows:

Flash
Object-based animation
Bones (inverse kinematics) tool including runtime support for interactive animations
Better support for H.264 video

Dreamweaver
Browser rendering engine built into the application
Source file toolbar that allows users to easily navigate between a web page’s dependent files, such as CSS and JavaScript

Fireworks
Standards-compliant CSS Export
Interactive PDF exports for prototypes

Illustrator
New Blob brush for better drawing control
Multiple artboards

Soundbooth
New non-destructive audio file format that allows for easy editing/integration with other Adobe products
Snapshots of your work for easy access to old versions of a file

After Effects
Searchable timelines
Textured 3D model import from Photoshop
Better motion tracking via Mocha AE
Export to editable Flash files
Device Central profiles for scaling compositions to fit specific device standards

Premiere
Speech-to-text metadata conversion allows for automatic transcriptions of voiceover or narration audio within video clips, which are then searchable
Multiple tapeless formats in a single project, sequence by sequence

Photoshop
3D painting and rotoscoping in Photoshop, including the ability to merge 2D layers onto 3D objects
Content aware resizing, very cool dynamic scaling technology acquired by Adobe during MAX last year

InDesign
Flash export

Encore
Dual layer Blu-Ray authoring support

Also new to the suite is the standalone Adobe Media Encoder, which supports batch encoding of multiple files to a wide variety of media formats. I haven’t figured out yet if this replaces the Flash Video Encoder, but my hunch is that it does.

Detailed video tutorials on all of the suites can be found at Adobe TV.

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