Product Reviews

Adobe's Premiere is back on the Mac as part of the Production Premium CS3 suite, alongside After Effects and Soundbooth. So will it pose a threat to Final Cut's dominance on the Mac? We look at the suite to find out.

Adobe video has come back to the Mac with a vengeance with Production Premium CS3. We can forgive the fact that it's even more of a mouthful than its design and web siblings, as the forthcoming CS3 suite sees the return to the Mac of Premiere, the broadcast-quality desktop video tool. The key reason for this return is the Intel processors inside Apple's current desktop and laptop lines; indeed, you'll have to have an Intel Mac to run the full suite. Adobe originally withdrew Premiere from the Mac platform in 2003 in response to Apple's Final Cut Pro strategy and the fact that the vast majority of its users were on the Windows platform. The subsequent strong showing of Final Cut Pro gives credence to Adobe's decision to concentrate on Windows, and it will need a strong product indeed to tear Mac users away.

Of course, there's a whole suite on offer here and a whole host of reasons why Adobe is bringing out these previews now. One is that the beta release date of the three products reviewed here coincided with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas. This is the annual event for the TV, film and motion graphics industry to show off new products, including Apple with news of Final Cut Studio 2. Another is to reveal the fruits of the acquisition of Macromedia and how they sit within the video product line. Still greater is the release of Windows Vista, again likely to be the big winner for Adobe.

The products on offer here are also an acknowledgement of the direction in which the broadcast industry is moving - offering a one-box solution for authoring your video and motion graphics content to many platforms. You can choose to output to anything from iPod Video to HD content on Blu-ray discs, while at the ingest end, anything up to and including HD video and 4K Film resolutions are supported. Perhaps it's this holistic approach that will determine Mac success for Production Premium.

So what's new and what's changed? We put early betas of Premiere, After Effects and Soundbooth to the test to find out.

Nowadays it's common to see Final Cut Pro being used for cheap, offline editing or even for cutting a whole show at the burgeoning low-budget end of the broadcast market. Ironically for Adobe, Final Cut was originally a Macromedia project, bought by Apple from the increasingly Flash-centric Macromedia reportedly because there was no version of Premiere in the pipeline for Mac OS X. Despite its heritage, Premiere now seems to be a less-visible contender in this area than the Apple upstart. The success of Final Cut Pro in the desktop post-production industry hasn't gone unnoticed - even Avid, the king of high-end editing, dipped a toe into the Final Cut Pro space with Avid Xpress Pro. So now that Adobe has deigned to go for the Mac video market again, what is it offering that Final Cut Pro can't?

In its CS3 incarnation, Premiere is being positioned as a tool for streamlining the entire video production process, from ingest and direct-to-disk recording, through powerful editing and out to multiple, cutting-edge delivery formats, all within a seamless workflow. To this end, it supports all major video standard-definition and high-definition formats, enabling you to edit everything from DV to 4K Film scans with all standard flavours of HD video, although depending on your system, additional hardware may be required for working at the highest resolutions.

Although it doesn't quite match the promised flexibility of the forthcoming Final Cut Pro 6, Premiere Pro can natively ingest and edit the progressive HDV formats and frame rates found in new cameras from Canon, Sony and JVC. To cope with all these streams and formats, Adobe has updated Bridge to handle footage and audio files, as well as image-based formats, allowing file previews, batch processing and editing of metadata. Premiere also aims to cut down on production bottlenecks by offering quick, intelligent search functions and multiple project panels. Each panel works almost as a mini-Bridge, offering graphical or text-based views so you can organise your production on an asset-to-asset basis.

One of the most notable new features is a Time Remapping tool, which, coupled with the support for HD footage from today's high-end cameras, will enable high-quality slow motion. It's not just for those nature shots on Planet Earth, however: everyone can take advantage of this function.

The key thing here is that you can vary the speed throughout the clip using speed keyframes, so you can ease time changes in or out by applying linear or smooth curves, freeze motion or send the footage running backwards in places. When you vary the speed of a clip with linked audio and video, the audio remains linked to the video, but remains at 100% speed, regardless of changes to the video speed. As the audio isn't synchronised, the Time Remapper feature may seem a bit more restrictive, apart from for effects shots and the likes of music promos.

Premiere builds on its non-linear editing (NLE) heritage with enhancements to Timeline editing, where you can replace one clip with another while preserving the replaced file's attributes, filters and effects settings, as well as new keyboard shortcuts. Colour management has received a boost, with primary and secondary colour-correction controls as well as support for 10-bit and 16-bit colour spaces. The Color Correction effects themselves are hidden away among the Video Effects, and you apply them to a clip in the same way you apply all standard effects. The Color Correction effects are applied on a per-clip basis, but you can apply them to multiple clips by nesting sequences. Effect properties are adjusted in the Effect Controls panel and you can choose a variety of tools to help with the job. Premiere Pro offers a vectorscope and waveform monitors (YC Waveform, YCbCr Parade and RGB Parade) to help you output a video programme that meets broadcast standards and assists you in making colour and brightness adjustments. It's similar to the existing tools in both Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress Pro.

Integrated titling is also a Premiere stalwart, making use of professionally designed templates or user-defined styles. Some of these styles include graphics pertinent to common movie subject matter, such as new baby or wedding themes. Others include placeholder text that you can replace to create credits for your movie. Templates can have transparent backgrounds so you can see your video beneath the title, while others are opaque.

Once you've selected and placed the template, it's easy to change any element by either deleting it, overwriting it or adding new elements to the mix. As you might expect, you can save any title you create as a template, and it's possible to import title files from another Premiere Pro project as templates. Your system must include all the fonts, textures, logos and images used in the imported template, however.

In addition, Mac users now have access to established Premiere strong points, such as graph-based keyframe controls and multi-camera editing features. There's also strong third-party plug-in support.

In addition, audio performance has improved to offer instantaneous feedback. You can play back audio in nested sequences without rendering, and position 5.1 sound channels quickly and easily. New Spectral Design filters are on hand to reduce noise, control dynamics, tweak EQ and add subtle effects. Also part of Production Premium, Adobe Soundbooth is linked directly to Premiere via the Edit In Adobe Soundbooth command, which you can use to send an audio file onwards for advanced editing.

Also new for Mac users will be Encore DVD, which Adobe has also now integrated into the main Premiere Pro package. Previously accessible via a dedicated Create Encore DVD button, full integration of Adobe Encore CS3 within Premiere means you now have the capability not only to encode a project to DVD, but also Blu-ray disc and Flash video (FLV) and SWF files, all direct from the Timeline and from the same assets. Source files can also be converted automatically to Mpeg-2 or H.264 video, and Dolby Digital and DTS audio. As such, it brings a sophisticated challenge to DVD Studio Pro's dominance on the Mac platform.

In contrast to Apple's panel-laden DVD authoring environment, Encore's menu creation system uses a deceptively simple drag-and-drop workflow that's nevertheless capable of producing DVDs to a very high standard. The tight integration with CS3 versions of Photoshop and After Effects enables roundtrip editing of visually rich and sophisticated menu systems, which are more than a match for the equivalent Apple solution, which doesn't offer a similarly integrated image editor. While Production Premium is the considerably more expensive option, you have to factor in the extra price of Photoshop into the Final Cut equation.

Premiere also offers Dynamic Link, a feature that allows rapid deployment of project assets, such as After Effects compositions in the Premiere Pro Timeline or within the Encore menu system, without the need to render them first. This being a beta, that feature, like a few others, failed to perform, but the promise of shuttling assets back and forth between Premiere and After Effects without rendering clips is beguiling to say the least.

As well as traditional output to tape and DVD, another integrated tool, the Adobe MediaEncoder, further expands options for delivery, enabling to you to compress video for playback on a mobile device, iPod or PSP using the built-in emulators to test your playback before playout. You can make use of the Media Encoder to export to video formats such as Mpeg-2, H.264, RealVideo, FLV and others, including a special mention for YouTube users in the help section (use H.264). It's also possible to resize and crop video during export, and automatically transfer files using FTP.

Not just a post-production solution, Premiere Pro CS3 also includes a video monitoring system in the shape of OnLocation CS3. This is a sophisticated standalone application designed to be used on set to monitor the shoot, calibrate cameras, and record DV and HDV directly to disk. It only runs under Windows - and is based on DV Rack HD from Serious Magic - but is capable of being run on a MacBook using Boot Camp. We strongly suspect we'll see a Mac-native version in the next major suite revision if not before.

Once a DV or HDV camera is connected using FireWire, OnLocation provides a virtual reference monitor, a comprehensive software waveform monitor and vectorscope, as well as an audio spectrum analyser to avoid problems and improve quality while shooting. Aiming to replace hardware-based field monitors or the limited view from an on-board camera LCD, the software can display HD images up to 1280 x 720 pixels, provides underscan and safe area views, as well as variable aspect ratios such as 4:3 and 16:9. It can record directly to the main hard disk of the Mac or to an external drive, and offers a traditional VTR-style interface. To a budget-conscious start-up production company, it will probably justify the price of the whole suite a few times over.

Furthermore, the production workflow also gets a boost in the form of clip notes, a PDF-based review system that includes an embedded or streamed movie of the project sequence. Produced in either QuickTime or Windows Media format, sequence markers are included with the movie as comments, so you can submit questions to reviewers or gather comments about specific parts of the movie, and reintegrate this feedback into the project.

Even if Mac users choose to snub Premiere Pro, there's no question any new version of After Effects will cause a stir. Loaded as it is with innovative features and tight Production Premium integration, After Effects Professional CS3 isn't going to dash expectations.

After Effects is already an industry-standard tool for motion graphics, and you'll see it used in a wide variety of broadcast and multimedia scenarios. Apple may be prepping a version of Motion that finally comes close, but with CS3, Adobe is revisiting one of After Effects' strengths: animation.

The most obvious illustration of this path is shape layers. Previously, you had to create vector graphics in a tool such as Illustrator before importing, but with Shape layers, After Effects Professional CS3 has its own vector creation tool, with the added bonus of animation. Shapes can be quickly drawn either with the Pen tool or from a selection of primitive shapes - rounded rectangle, ellipse, star and the like. Vector creation works just as it does in Illustrator. Here, however, each shape attribute - the path, stroke and fill - is represented as a property group in the Timeline panel, with properties that you can animate, just as you do with any other layer property.

It's when you start adding path operations such as Pucker and Bloat, Twist and Zig Zag that things start to get interesting. You can create unique animations by just experimenting with these on their own. The effects become even more grandiose when you add more shapes to the layer - a shape layer can contain any number of component shapes. These instantly take on the layer attributes, leading to some very complex effects. Text can also be converted to a shape layer, enabling you to warp its shape over time. There are also a number of preset shape animations that are accessible through the Browse Presets entry on the Animation menu. This brings up Bridge, which offers previews of these and other effect presets. It's an excellent tool and easy to pick up.

Talking of layers, After Effects can preserve Photoshop layer styles when importing .psd files. You can also apply layer styles in After Effects and animate their properties, while vector masks in imported PSD files are converted to editable After Effects masks. As Photoshop files can now support video and animation layers, it's useful to know that After Effects can import such files in the normal fashion. The choice is to import them either as a footage item with all layers merged together or as a composition with each Photoshop layer separate and editable in After Effects; you'll need QuickTime 7.1 or later.

The next big thing is the Puppet tool. Just add the tool's pins to any shape, text or layer and you can start to drag the limbs, components or body parts around. The pins define what parts of the image should move, what parts should remain rigid and what parts should be in front when parts overlap.

Unlike most properties in After Effects, where you must explicitly set the stopwatch switch by adding a keyframe or an expression to animate each property, it's automatically set for the Position property of a Deform pin as soon as the pin is created. As such, a keyframe is set or modified each time you change the position of a Deform pin within the Composition panel or Layer panel, making it convenient to add Deform pins and animate them directly without manipulating the properties in the Timeline panel.

The actual operation works using an invisible deforming mesh that's automatically overlaid on the figure when the first pin is placed. On vector images, the mesh follows a boundary created from a mask path, shape path or from the outline of a text character, or via auto-trace. As a result, natural lifelike 'squash and stretch' movements become a piece of cake. Bitmap images are assigned a rectangular layer around the boundary. Like anything else, the more care you take over the Puppet tool, the better the effects will be, but it's easy to create really effective animations in a matter of minutes, and you can record movements live rather than using keyframes.

Another aid to creativity is Brainstorm, which works in a similar fashion to the Variations tool in Photoshop. Brainstorm is invoked by selecting an effect or set of parameters that can be animated, and clicking on the dedicated button in the Timeline panel. The grid displays multiple temporary variants of your composition, and you can save variants for further experimentation or click and apply your favourites to the composition. If you're not inspired, it's simply a case of clicking the Brainstorm button again with a randomness slider thrown in for good measure, or you can express preferences to generate random variations based on a design that you like. Brainstorm is a slick tool that could

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possibly cut down time spent generating random animations for backgrounds and motion menus.

Another new animation feature is the ability to move, scale and rotate text characters in 3D. Enabling per-character 3D properties for the text layer, whether by selecting this command in the menu or contextually clicking on the layer, causes each character in the text layer to behave like an individual 3D layer. In turn, the text layer behaves like a precomposition with collapsed transformations. 3D properties that can be animated appear in the Timeline for position, anchor point and scale, and two extra rotation properties (X Rotation and Y Rotation) become available.

Workflow has also been addressed in this release, with the inclusion of clip notes for After Effects. This streams or embeds a movie of the project, complete with text fields so that the author and reviewers can add comments based on the timecode.

After Effects has always scored over Motion in terms of its close integration with Photoshop and Premiere. As we've seen, this integration has now been extended to include Bridge. One of the benefits of the Macromedia acquisition has been the further integration of Flash, also shipping as part of the Production Premium suite. You can export After Effects content for use in Flash directly as a .swf file that can be played immediately in Flash Player or used as part of another Flash project. The content is flattened and rasterised in the SWF file. Another option is to save the rendered video out as a Flash Video (FLV) file, with Any After Effects markers kept intact and added to the FLV file as cue points. Similar two-way traffic is possible from a Flash perspective.

Other export settings make it possible to output your composition to a selection of mobile devices such as mobile phones and iPods, and you can view some previews of such output types using Device Central, which emulates many mobile devices.

Adobe has replaced the more professional Audition with Soundbooth. Gone are obvious pro-audio features such as low-latency multi-track recording, recordable parameter automation, and audio CD burning and extraction. In their place are a task-based toolset, on-clip controls for single-asset editing and cue-point support for Flash. Further, while Audition's loop library is no more, CS3 users gain AutoCompose Score for quickly customising Soundbooth Scores.

The obvious competitor for Soundbooth in Final Cut Studio is Soundtrack Pro, which has offered various noise removal tools for some time. Soundtrack's new surround sound features are already matched in Premiere Pro's own audio support, so we've got to look at this application for other strengths.

The most obvious of these is the AutoCompose Score feature, which will allow you to select one of the dozens of included Soundbooth Scores and then customise it to match your project. You'll be able to adjust the intensity to match the project's visual mood and change the length of the soundtrack to fit. There's also meant to be thousands of sound effects available via the online Resource Central repository. Neither of these seemed to be up and running in the beta we looked at, though.

Looking more closely at what does work in the beta, we found the most useful features to be the Audio tasks. These are stacked in individual panels below the AutoCompose box. The Remove a Sound task is typical in that the panel offers a variety of options - in this case, a choice of tool types, an auto-heal function, resolution and scale selectors and a playback option.

Soundbooth offers more than one way to view your audio track. There's the usual clip view showing peaked waveforms, but there's also a revealing spectral frequency display to analyse waveforms in detail. You can edit within this display using these Photoshop-style tools.

The Clean Up Audio tools give you the option of removing clicks, pops and low rumbles. There's also a separate Noise filter for removing sudden, intermittent noises such as doors slamming. On using each of the Clean Up Audio tools, a separate Settings dialog lets you set the reduction aggressively or with a lighter touch, while a Preview button is on hand to test the results.

You can choose to create a loop from any selected sound sequence, and another Task panel gives access to Pitch and Timing controls. In addition to tasks, Soundbooth offers a battery of around 15 filter effects, to modify audio characteristics such as EQ, reverb, echo, flange, chorus, distortion, time and pitch, and more.

The workspace can be customised by docking panels and windows wherever you like. You can save Workspaces, and some presets ship with Soundbooth for common workflows. A Navigator control enables you to quickly move through audio files, while zooming controls give quick access to the sample level for focused edits or analysis.

Soundbooth also offers roundtrip audio editing with Premiere Pro, with a contextual link from clips in the Project panel or Timeline to edit the track in Soundbooth. Once editing is complete, the restructured audio is updated in the video editing program.

You can, however, bring in video clips for traditional sound editing, as Soundbooth offers instant cut, copy and paste functions and on-clip controls for trim, fade and volume. You can also combine two existing audio assets quickly with the Mix Paste feature.

When working with imported video, the footage scrubs simultaneously in a small video preview box as you scrub through the audio waveforms. Mpeg, QuickTime, AVI and WMA video files are supported, but there doesn't seem to be support for importing native HDV formats in this build.

You can, of course, record new audio assets with Soundbooth. A dialogue offers a choice of mono or stereo audio files at a choice of sample rates. Soundbooth can open or save to WAV, AIFF, MP3, and WMA formats. A bit of a glaring omission is support for AAC. There is no support for Apple Lossless either, but there might be a royalty wrangle behind that decision.

Soundbooth adheres to the Adobe mantra of integration with support for Flash cue points. Soundbooth can edit cue point properties and designated them as event or navigation types, and you can even embed markers directly within FLV files. Markers are also present in Audition, but seem there to provide a wider role, functioning rather like keyframes for audio files and allowing a host of useful effects. At present, the only choice available in this build of Soundbooth seems to be for the Flash cue points.

Of the three beta previews, Soundbooth does seem to be the most recently finished. That said, the application is stable enough and looks likely to be a well used and integral part of Production Premium.

There's not really enough room here to cover in detail all the other products that will ship in Production Premium, which is expected in the summer of 2007. There are some products included with which you'll already be familiar if you read MacUser's review of the print and web editions of CS3, but there's another, as-yet-unrevealed product in the suite aimed squarely at the broadcast market. Ultra is Adobe's new keying application that will ship with the suite, and it's a jaw-dropper. There's still a Windows bias here, though, as the Mac version lacks Ultra - you can't perform the same Boot Camp workaround as you can with OnLocation.

Ultra

Unlike other applications in the suite, Ultra is only available as part of the Production Premium or Master Collection suites. Like OnLocation, it's derived from the Serious Magic product line, but this is a studio replacement rather than a field monitor. You can create a virtual set using little more than Photoshop files or use the set templates that come ready supplied. Sets shipping with the application will include newsrooms, galleries, and educational and corporate settings as well as animated backgrounds.

What's more, you can preview this all on a laptop during the shooting process - it's possible to use a Set Key feature to quickly prep the video, while real-time colour correction and 32-bit rendering quality help deliver the best results for broadcast.

It supports all standard HD and HDV resolutions, as well as AVI, Mpeg, DV, QuickTime and Flash. Of course, Ultra also integrates seamlessly with Premiere Pro and After Effects - on Windows, that is. Hopefully, Adobe will rectify this in CS4; it may simply not have had the time here.

Flash Professional CS3

Each of the Adobe suites so far revealed have included a copy of the rebranded Flash Professional. While it may look a little out of place in Design Premium, it's right at home here, thanks to Flash video support. Flash Professional CS3 offers its own high-quality video encoder as well as advanced QuickTime export and alpha channel support, and the markers exported from other CS3 applications in FLV files find interactive use within Flash. Graphics and subtitles can be assigned to imported cue points, or can trigger other FLV or SWF files to play.

Adobe seems to be pitching Flash at its After Effects user base. Both applications are Timeline based, make use of editable layers and offer scripting to control the animation, so it really becomes a choice of whether you're outputting your project for broadcast or mobile delivery. We've seen that the actual content is now far more interchangeable within CS3, but Flash also offers further interactivity via its ActionScript authoring environment. This has been updated in CS3 to offer you a new debugger tool to highlight problems, while an improved Script Assist mode cuts down on coding.

Further workflow enhancements make use of the new Components panel, which contains pre-built ActionScript 3 user interface and video components. Flash also integrates well with Photoshop and Illustrator, not only in terms of a similar, panel-based interface, but also thanks to the fact that you can now import native files from the two applications while maintaining full fidelity. There are also Illustrator-style pen tools and keyboard shortcuts, as well as Shape primitive tools.

Illustrator CS3

There are several good reasons why Illustrator is included in the suite. It offers, for example, film and video presets for an interactive crop area tool, while that all-important colour control is possible with the real-time Live Color tool.

Document profiles are also available for dedicated motion graphics work. For example, if you choose a Video and Film profile and a preset size such as HDV 1080, the artboard will automatically display the format's dimensions with guides for video and title-safe areas, as well as setting the colour mode to RGB.

Photoshop Extended CS3

Photoshop has cropped up throughout this preview and with good reason. It's the lynchpin that holds the whole suite together. As you'll no doubt have read in MacUser's previous CS3 review, the non-destructive and fully editable Smart Filters, superior bitmap image processing, and enhanced cloning and selection tools are among the best of suite offerings from the new version of Photoshop.

Photoshop also offers several excellent features for motion graphics users. There's native support for video layers in colour depths from 8- to 32-bit, which enables you to use Movie Paint to paint on every frame of a movie file using the standard Photoshop image editing tools. Frame Offset control for cloning or healing is also available, so that, in effect, you can clone over time, with unique results. An onion-skinning feature will be familiar to animators, but for everyone else, it provides a valuable way to see the previous and next frames to the one you're currently editing.

Video files can also now be exported from Photoshop for use as rich media in After Effects, while existing motion graphics or SWF files can be imported and edited on a frame-by-frame basis using the Timeline.

Photoshop now directly supports objects in native 3D file formats, increasing the profile of the suite in high-end creative workflows. 3D models can be visualised and edited, so you could work on architectural cutaway diagram of a house, for example. Vanishing point can now offer extra 3D benefits, as it's no longer restricted to adding planes at 90° angles. Multiple planes can be constructed in any image, connected at any angle. As well as support for 32-bit HDR, colour control enhancements and the ease of use of transferring rich media assets, Photoshop Extended is an essential complement to Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Device Central CS3

Using Adobe Device Central, you can preview movies formatted for mobile devices in emulations of those devices. You can access it from the Adobe Media Encoder option available in Premiere Pro, After Effects, Soundbooth and Encore, and choose to export content in 3GPP or H.264 formats. Mobile content from Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator can also be directly previewed in Device Central on realistically skinned phones and devices before you deploy it in the real world. The realism extends to button functionality, as well as emulation of screen and lighting conditions in some cases. Constant updates provide regular additional device profiles.

Bridge CS3

Less of a file management tool and more of a central hub, Bridge has an extended remit with CS3 to browse for audio and movie files, as well as project templates and animation presets. It's capable of running cross-product workflow automation scripts and organising files by assigning them keywords, labels and ratings. There are new ways to view and manage files and folders, as well as search for files, and view, edit and add metadata. In addition, Bridge offers new collaboration facilities, while Bridge Home, a new online resource for Adobe Bridge CS3, provides up-to-date information on all Production Premium software in one location.

Conclusion

We tested beta versions of Premiere, After Effects and Soundbooth on a Mac Pro desktop (dual 2.66GHz dual-core Intel Xeon) running Mac OS X 10.4.9 with 1GB of Ram. We also installed After Effects on a dual 2GHz G5 desktop, but there were installation problems. All builds running on the Mac Pro ran smoothly - even simultaneously - although Premiere did stand out for its frequent crashing.

On the basis of the three beta releases, Production Premium looks set to be a worthy addition to Adobe's CS3 range. Premiere is still an excellent tool, especially with its wide-format support and OnLocation, while After Effects just goes from strength to strength. The weakest link here is probably Soundbooth, which could be seen to be in the shadow of Soundtrack Pro, in the same way that After Effects dwarfs Motion. With a fully working version of AutoCompose Score, and Motion's new Shake-derived features, that situation might reverse itself, of course. Like any choice between two similar suites, it depends on your personal needs.

The full Production Premium CS3 suite will ship for £1656, with upgrades pegged at £704. At these prices, Apple's £849 Final Cut Studio 2 will, of course, be a much cheaper option. Like any choice between two similar suites, however, it depends on what you need and if you already have Photoshop CS3; the Extended version in this suite costs £887 as a standalone product. Our buying advice is to check out the beta previews for yourself, read the preview of Apple's offering on p52 and see what matches your needs. And, remember, there are always alternatives, such as Avid Xpress Pro (£1059).

The return to the Mac of Premiere is to be welcomed, but it may be a case of too little too late to catch up with the desktop dominance of Final Cut Pro. The fact that two of the products on review wouldn't run on anything less than an Intel Mac is also a problem. Final Cut Studio will run on a G5, and even a 1.25GHz G4 Mac if the system requirements are to be believed. Many desktop video professionals and enthusiasts invested in Mac hardware to run Final Cut Pro the first time around and it's not likely they'll jump ship for the whole suite when the standout product, After Effects, is available as a standalone product and won't run on PowerPC hardware.

However, such late adopters and PowerBook-based editors are probably not the market Adobe is after with this release. In reality, it's probably a fairly small market in the grand scheme of things. Broadcast post-production facilities are relatively few in number, especially in this country, and as we've said previously, Avid and Autodesk still own the high end.

Most Production Premium users will undoubtedly be found on Windows Vista, but there are a growing number of independent production companies happy (or forced by budgetary cuts) to do most of their editing in a back room on a laptop or desktop machine. For such producers, a chic MacBook is the next purchase. Whether they'll load it with Production Premium or Final Cut Studio depends on Adobe's pricing strategy and their need for Photoshop and OnLocation.