Overall the day was great, I got out of exactly what I expected. Enough information to really know wether the price of upgrade to CS4 is really worth it. After today i really have to say it is, at least for my situation. BlackMagic were also there, I spoke to them about CS4 compatibility with the Intesity Pro capture card I use, they mentioned that Adobe CS4.1 is due in about a month and Adobe will add support for thieir cards in April.

The Adobe CS4 Roadshow in Melbourne was the last in Australia.

The blogosphere is alight today with the news that Apple and Adobe are teaming up to get the Flash Player on the iPhone. As we all let out a simultaneous "it’s about time", let’s hope the implementation is as good as we all hope.

Flash Player on the desktop is very different to  Flash Player Lite on mobile devices, with much of the functionality not available. From previous announcements from Adobe, the iPhone version should land somewhere in the middle, given the iPhone actually has some decent processing power.

The question remains if online video streaming services like Stick.am, Vimeo, Viddler and many, many more can actually stream video to the iPhone using their existing delivery platform – Flash. Ustream already managed a workaround to get their video to the iPhone, this most likely required additional streaming servers at a reasonable cost. After Flash for the iPhone arrives, they could potentially switch back to using flash like on their site.

The worst part about this, is there’s still no date. I’d expect to see it within the next 2 months, let’s hope it’s a lot sooner and not handicapped.

More @ Engadget

Adobe’s Online Creative Festival, or online seminars of their CS4 products is now complete.

Despite a number of audio-related issues during today’s online seminars, overall I had a very enjoyable, informative experience. The attendance wasn’t massive only around 100 people in each session, but still very informative, helping form the basis for an upgrade decision.

The good news is the seminars should be available online in the next few days @ http://www.adobeonlinefestival.com/

Below is a list of the things I took away from todays event, some of which was already known about the suite, but still noteworthy and was good to see demonstrated.

• Dreamweaver CS4
  Live link, auto-optimise from Photoshop doc to image in website.
  Drag and Drop Flash movie into page now validates as valid XHTML 1.0 transitional.
  Properties panel context sensitive, now has HTML and CSS settings.
  Upgraded Spry Framework – HTML Datasets now supported (widget)
  Live View browser engine (Webkit) actually works, you can now edit with Live View enabled.
  Web Widgets – support for 3rd party widgets support (i.e. Yahoo).
  JavaScript / AJAX code hinting
  Authoring for AIR
• Soundbooth CS4
  Speech to Text, can identify multiple speakers.
  Transcript is editible
  Can export to XML file, import as markers
  Export to Flash, publish searchable words to the web.
• Encore CS4
  Dynamic Link / Import of Premiere Pro project
  Output to Blu-ray options advanced (can output to folder, dual-layer 50GB disc).
  Menu’s are actually .PSD files, dynamically linked.
  Advanced Flash export options
• Photoshop CS4 (extended)
  Improvements in speed and layout of Bridge
  Much more control of window layout options
  New non-destructive adjustment layers
  Auto-blend now works with Stacked photos can combine focus of a number of images.
  New Spherical 360 degree panorama stitching.
  Map to 3D sphere (can control inside photoshop)
  3D objects, texturing, lighting controls !! (eyeball demo’d)
  Content-aware scaling of images, important areas can be preserved
• Flash CS4
  UI redesign, heavily customizable
  Searchable library
  Rebuilt animation model
  Motion tweens now automatically add animation path, path and object can be altered.
  Motion Editor provides granular control over animation properties (triangles in timeline indicate property changes
  Scalable animations, very easy, drag handles at end of animation
  Filters can be modified over time
  Motion presets, can be saved, shared, imported.
  IK (Bone Tool), Bind Tool (controls shape under bones)
  New Deco tool + drawing effect (Uses objects in your library to fill)
  New Spray Brush Tool (animated stars in sky demo)
  New 3D Rotation + Translation Tools
  Import from InDesign
  PixelBlender filter support

  Note: A lot of these new features require Flash Player 10.

• Premiere CS4
  No render workflow – immediate update of After Effects content in Premiere.
  Animation Presets – Bridge
  Better multi-core support
  Vista 64-bit support (extra RAM support)
  Speech to text transcription (faster editing)
  Adobe Media Encoder now separate product that supports batch rendering.
  Bulk application of transitions to multiple clips
  Better support for HDD based cameras (AVCHD support !!)
  Quadro CX will add 6x to 10x performance when rendering H.264 support.
  Different sequences are supported in the one project.
• Soundbooth CS4
  Multi-track editing
  Scores / Resource Central (clips)
  Dynamic Link – Import Premiere Pro Sequence
  Video preview
  Speech to text transcription (faster editing)
  New Volume correction tool, can draw from multiple files to normalize over.
• Device Central
  Updated to support testing multiple devices (up to 9) simultaneously
  Online Library of constantly updated supported devices.

Adobe have announced their new line of Creative Suite of applications with some much needed upgrades. As some of you will be aware the techAU website and podcast are all produced using Adobe CS3 products, these include Dreamweaver, Premiere, Fireworks, Soundbooth, and After Effects.

One of my biggest pain points with the CS3 products is how they’re bundled, if your a content producer that does everything from web development to video editing, then your only option is to get the very pricey Master Collection.

What’s new ? There’s a very long list of updates in CS3, so I’ll focus on the ones I find most interesting. separated by product.

Adobe Premiere CS4

New format support – Finally AVCHD will be supported, along with P2, XDCAM EX/HD. All these will see native support, a long overdue feature that should have really been included in CS3. Some (like myself) have had to resort to work arounds, like expensive 3rd party AVCHD plugins, these will now be rendered redundant with CS4.

Batch encoding
The current Adobe Flash Encoder has been expanded to become the Adobe Media Encoder. This should be great for podcasters and video producers in general that provide their content in multiple formats. A set and forget (likely overnight) background task will batch render jobs. Ideally this would be complimented by allowing FTP uploads on completion for the ultimate unattended render job.

Searchable Audio
If you’ve ever tried to find a specific section of the audio during the editing process, you’ve likely spent a long time srubbing through the audio, assuming this feature works as advertised, you’ll now be able to search for a word and the location(s) in the audio track will be identified. Effectively reducing editing time. Any improvements in this area are most welcome.

Apply default transitions to multiple clips
If you like to apply the same effect to multiple clips, let’s say a dissolve at the start and end of each clip, this has been a very manual task of dragging the effect to the top and tail of each clip. Something very time consuming when u have elements numbering in the hundreds. CS4 ads the ability to apply a default transition to multiple selected clip with a single command, another great time-saving addition.

Available in boxed or download (5.2 GB) versions, expected to ship late October 2008.

More about Premiere CS4 @ Adobe

Adobe SoundBooth CS4

Multi-track editing
This provides the ability to work on multiple tracks separately, so if your working with vocals, music, etc and want to apply effects and adjustments, these can now be done per layer in CS4. While SoundBooth is the baby brother of Adobe Audition, one of the key features that was left out of SoundBooth was multi-track editing, CS4 remedies this.

New ASND file format
Adobe have created a new file format to support the new multi-layer / multi-track audio format. Adobe Sound Document or ASND for short.

Searchable Audio
This works as outlined above in Premiere CS4.

Compression preview
Audio editing and especially exporting the final product is very much a trial and error process. CS4 allows users to preview how the MP3 compression will sound before exporting, saving time.. I’m detecting a common theme among these improvements – saving time.

Available in boxed or download (4.3 GB) versions, expected to ship late October 2008.

More about SoundBooth CS4 @ Adobe

Adobe Photoshop CS4

3D Painting
New to CS4 is support to paint 3D objects directly inside Photoshop. While details on format support is currently lacking, it’s listed as ‘common 3D formats’. Take from that what you will.

Content-Aware Scaling
This actually fairly impressive technology that lets you stretch images without distorting important elements in the photo. The example shown is people on a beach, the sand and sea are stretched to widen the image, yet the people are not. This lets the image scale, perhaps to fit a specific area, without visibly distorting the people (which would be very noticeable).

Available in boxed or download (1 GB) versions, expected to ship late October 2008.

More about Photoshop CS4 @ Adobe


Adobe Flash CS4

3D Tranformation
Objects can now be rotated in the 3rd dimension. A natural evolution to being able to create and animate objects in the X and Y co-ordinates, Adobe Flash CS4 ads the Z axis. I’m assuming this can also be accessed via ActionScript. While much of the functionality of Director has been replaced by Flash, the single point of difference has been Flash’s lack of 3D tools, could this spell the end for Director completely ?

IK
Inverse Kinetics (or kinematics) relates to the intelligent connection of joints on 2 or more objects. A simply example would be the limbs of the human body. Elbows and Knee joints for example can’t rotate past a certain point, to bend the arm or leg further, rotation of another joint needs to occur. IK respects this and applies motion based on these restrictions. A great addition for those animating people or equipment.

Motion Presets
Another efficiency-focused feature, Motion presets allows commonly created animations to be applied to objects quickly, currently this requires creating the same effect each time from scratch. Created motion presets can also be shared with others.

There’s obviously a lot more products in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 than covered here, for all the info about Adobe CS4, head over to http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite

In this video Adobe confirms we will see AVCHD support in Premiere in the future, but have nothing official to announce at this time.

They do advise those who are after support for the format right now, that you can get Main Concept’s MPEG PRO HD plugin for Premiere. This plugin certainly doesn’t come cheap at US$449, however I purchased this plugin a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been using an AVCHD camera since early last year, the Sony HDR-SR1, which uses the AVCHD codec and comes with terrible software.

Until then I’d been forced to transcode the AVCHD video into a Premiere supported format, which not only cost quality, but also time. I’m fairly happy with the plugin, it lets for direct timeline editing of 1080 HD video which is neat, however they don’t support the standard Adobe Media Encoder which means any presets you have won’t work. Your forced to use their exporter, which is anything but user-friendly.

That aside it has reduced my video production time by a good 2-3 hours. Adobe claim that once they do add AVCHD support to Premiere it’ll be native support and work much better than 3rd party products. Given we may see Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 as soon as October this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe play their typical upgrade tricks and force users to upgrade to receive the support.