Adobe Video Collection

A bouquet looks more beautiful than a single flower, though all the flowers in the same may not be equally beautiful. So is the case with this package. It's a mix of various product offerings from Adobe, namely Adobe Photoshop CS, Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5 - Professional, Audition 1.5, and Encore DVD 1.5.

The package also contains a couple of extra CDs with Premiere Pro sample files and hundreds of production quality music loops in the Loopology content CD. In addition to these, if you are new to any of these packages, the Video Workshop training DVD would introduce you to them. The DVD contains about 2 hours of training videos. If you are an After Effects freak then there is more in store for you. 3D invigorator-AE Classic comes bundled in the pack, to help you create 3D titles and logos in your After Effects work.

While Premiere Pro is competing hard with Pinnacle Liquid Effects, Encore is trying to fight its ground with Ulead DVD workshop. 

The hugely popular Premiere comes with a new uncluttered interface and some good upgrades but still leaves us wanting for more. The upgrades come in the form of Auto adjustment features in the forefront. These filters have been borrowed from Photoshop and work in a similar fashion. They come in the form of Auto Color, Auto Levels, shadows and highlights and Auto contrast. The place where it still lacks a bit is in background rendering. But, if you use both After Effects and Premiere together you would be nothing less than thrilled, because it finally supports copy paste between these programs. The integration goes a bit further with better support for Photoshop files.

While software like Pinnacle Liquid Effects have a robust DVD authoring engine in themselves you would still need the help of Encore to author DVDs for you. But, Encore is no less either. It offers you an interface that is a no-brainer to understand and the flexibility to work with Photoshop among other things. Both of them being Adobe products, they integrate with each other seamlessly and allow you to transfer the artwork that you have created in photoshop including layers directly to Encore DVD. Quite a breeze! In Encore's case too, Adobe has tried to bring in some interface enhancements, though they have not been able to solve the problem of too many windows on the desktop, fully, but atleast it is a step in the right direction. 

Now, Encore can also encode in the background cutting down on the total production time. But, make sure you have a machine that can handle that kind of load.

Videos through, let's get to audio now. Audition is top notch to say the least. It is as good for simple audio correction and restoration, as it is for professional audio editing. It adds to its already plethora of tools the ability to burn CDs directly. Also, it adds an interesting Center Channel extractor tool that would help you in reducing vocals or instrumentals in a track and make Karaoke CDs.

Audible now allows you to use the marquee tool for frequency space editing

Moving to After Effects, it also goes in for some interesting upgrades. The favorite obviously being the addition to the text filters as well as more special effects like particle world, light burst and toner. Next in line comes the ability to cache to disk and preview your work much faster, and now with the ability to attach PAL/NTSC monitors through a FireWire video output.

Finally, you would not get a package of products of this caliber at this price. As a bundle, with photoshop CS it costs a little over a
Lakh. 

The bottom line: Great buy as a package, with good enhancements in Premiere, Audition and Encore.

Geetaj Channana