The other week a workmate and I attended a workshop day in which we were shown to the new Adobe Creative Suite 4. The theme of the day was shortcut to Brilliant. Being someone who uses these products on a daily basis, I was very interested to see if making the switch would be worth while. Admittedly I was skeptical about how much could have been changed, a reduced number of bugs in flash would have made the purchase more attractive to myself.
After a few introduction and marketing speeches we got into the juicy stuff. Premiere Pro and After Effects was first up. This was the one presentation that was probably the least relevant to work I am currently doing, although I have had a fair amount of experience in Premiere Pro. This presentation was nothing short of amazing. It was absolutely mind blowing to see how easy it was to move clips between programs with such ease! The presenter did go on about his love for his HP machine, but still, this computer was handling at least 5, what used to be memory intensive, video editing programs and handling it without a problem! There was a lot of information in this part, but the fact that clips of video can now be switched between different programs without being rendered and continually be updated in every program, was pretty damn impressive.
Next up was a session on Illustrator and InDesign, again they are not something I use on a day-to-day basis, but I do use Illustrator every now and again. This was again very impressive, but maybe slightly wasted on me, as I did not know exactly what these programs could or could not achieve before, so anything new was just cool. There were a few sighs of amazement from audience members which made you release some new tool was going to save them a lot of time and frustration.
Then came the more interesting sessions (well sessions that applied to my daily work). It is hard to know where to even start on the changes in Flash. First up, there was not one bit of actionscript in this session, but the things you can now do without touching one little bit of actionscript is truly amazing. The most impressive part of this session and possibly the whole day was the use of inverse kinematics (The study of how movement of a body part affects other attached body parts.) within flash. This means that simple animations can be made with ease and have a much larger level of professionalism in an enormously shorter amount of time. Photoshop also had some new awesome features, but after seeing where Flash had developed too, it was hard to top it.
At the beginning of the day I was wondering why such an event would be free, but after seeing CS4 in action, it became clear. Had I not been to the event, I would probably be sitting back, not realizing what I was missing out on, because how much could they really change? The answer is more than you could imagine, and putting on such an event means more people buying their product, after seeing exactly what lengths it can go to.
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