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I recently got the opportunity to snag a copy of the latest and greatest Adobe CS 5.5 Production Premium. This review will be made from the perspective of an animated filmmaker and amateur videography hobbyist.
The .5 means that Adobe is trying something new with their product cycle. Instead of launching a new product about every 2 years or so, they are launching a product mid-cycle, every year. The Adobe folks stress that this will allow features to be pushed to consumers quicker, but I can't help but think that this was mostly a business decision.
Let's start with what's changed from CS5. From the Adobe website:
Take advantage of sweeping performance enhancements in Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium software, including powerful new audio editing capabilities, workflow improvements, and advanced compositing effects.
The thing is, the bulk of the changes in CS 5.5 Production Premium are in After Effects and Premiere (there are virtually no upgrades to Photoshop and Illustrator) and I am not sure this justifies the US$399 upgrade fee (if you are upgrading from CS5). The Warp Stabilisation tool in After Effects is in my opinion is amazing, and may alone justify the purchase for indie filmmakers, who can actually save a ton of money in steadycam rentals. Imagine taking a shaky handheld shot and converting it to a smooth tracking shot. I have a sample video below and you can see the results are pretty decent. Not as mind blowing as the sample videos on the Adobe website, but decent. The quality of the stabilized shot really depends on the shakiness of your source file, so results may vary. When I first read about CS 5.5, this was the feature that got me most excited.
In this stabilized video, the edges are synthesized, but not very well, probably because there is too much going on in the edges. There's sort of an earthquake effect if you view this in HD, because the shutter speed was too slow and there was too much shake.
In this video I chose to crop the edges instead of synthesizing them, since I realise there was no way the software was going to synthesize believable edges in such a complicated footage. Very decent result, although it would require more tweaks to be usable in a film.
Tip: when shooting a footage meant to be stabilized, make sure you shoot wider than intended. This is because while the synthesize edges function is quite magical, it more often than not does not play nice, and you end up having to crop the footage. Also, shoot at a high shutter speed, at least 1/200. A stabilized shot wouldn't look good with motion blur.
The other After Effects additions, like light falloff and camera lens blur are small additions that you might already have plugins for. The new Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere is supposedly faster, but I don't have a frame of reference since I never really used Premier in CS5.
The biggest update to Photoshop is the addition of tablet functionality. I tried this out with one of the new Adobe iPad apps, Eazel, and I found it to be simple and straightforward, with minimal setup I managed to push my artwork from the iPad to the computer. However, this update is available free to users of Photoshop CS5 users, so you don't have to purchase CS5.5 to get this feature.
Flash got a small bump in features too. It now allows you to publish on mobile devices including tablets much easier through Adobe Air. Inverse kinematics allow you to animate objects and characters like you would in an advanced 3D software like Maya, although I don't see how it would be used much in a 2D environment. There's autosave now, which is crazy that it's only in Flash now, considering how much it has crashed on me.
What I would have liked to see in this release is an easier way to work with dual channel stereoscopic footage. I deal with a lot of this at work, and I have had to create workarounds to deal with the limitations of After Effects. There is a new 3D stereoscopic camera rig but this is only for 3D compositions made in After Effects, not rendered animations or footage from cameras. For instance, It would be great if I could load the left channel into a composition, and it automatically creates a second composition that takes in all the footage of my right channel and updates this composition whenever I make changes to my left footage.
With these little changes, it is hard to justify a purchase of Adobe CS 5.5 to those who already own CS5. The additions are very specific to certain users, like the Red camera support, which I personally do not use since I mainly do 3D animation, and even if I were to shoot video, I shoot it with my trusty Canon 550D. The warp stabilization tool is great, but you can hold off till Adobe releases CS6 to play with it.
Things are different if you are upgrading from a much earlier version of CS, or if you are just getting started with Adobe CS altogether. Some may argue that Adobe has added far too many features and ended up bloating Creative Suite, but I think you are getting bang for your buck. But note that upgrading from CS4 Production Premium can set you back US$789. There is a new subscription service that allows you to "pay as you go" for as low as US$85 a month, but anyone using this piece of software for a living will not find that economically viable. If you've decided not to upgrade this time round, there's always a new Creative Suite around the corner, so you know another (paid) upgrade is less than 12 months away.
