just got 12 new adobe programs, which ones are useful?

Jasta85 · Post by **Jasta85** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 1:39 pm

ok, i managed to borrow the CS3 (creative suite 3 master collection) of adobe products, and it has some great editing programs. the thing is that once installed, they eat up a huge amount of space on my computer (6-7 gigs). I don't know what some of these programs do or if they are useful in making amvs so i'll just stickt the list up here. I just want to know what programs would be pertenent to amv making

Adobe InDesign® CS3
Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended
Adobe Illustrator® CS3
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional
Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3
Adobe Fireworks® CS3
Adobe Contribute®
Adobe After Effects® CS3 Professional
Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3 (already have primiere pro 2.0 so i'll be skipping this one either way).
Adobe Soundbooth™ CS3
Adobe Encore® CS3

I plan to keep photoshop and afer effects as i know they are used quite commonly, how useful are the others?

thanks in advance for the advice

kenzuka · Post by **kenzuka** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 5:03 pm

Strictly for amv-making, you don't need anything else than premiere (After effect and photshop are also very useful)

You can also add Soundbooth to mix your audio, especially if the overall quality of your audio file is not good. Soundbooth has some interresting effects to suppress noise among others things.

Encore can also be useful because it allows you to create DVD video.

The others softwares are not useful to make amvs.

JediNight · Post by **JediNight** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 11:37 pm

Are Audition and Soundbooth separate programs? Or did Adobe change the name again after buying the software from Syntrillium like 2 years ago?

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 6:59 am

I would recommend premiere CS3 as it seems to have fixed a number of bugs and other issues that I had with previous versions. Other than that, Photoshop and After Effects are all that I really use.

Here's a run down of what everything is (my best guesses, anyways):

Adobe InDesign® CS3 - Page layout software for designing crap like magazines or newsletters.
Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended - Image editing.
Adobe Illustrator® CS3 - Creating vector graphics. Can be useful for amvs, but it's difficult to learn, IMO, and the uses are limited.
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional - Creating PDF files. Extremely bloated and useless.
Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional - For creating flash animations like you see on web pages. Could be somewhat useful, but I doubt it.
Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3 - For designing web sites.
Adobe Fireworks® CS3 - I'm not really sure what purpose this program serves. It can create vector graphics like Illustrator, but it is far more limited than Illustrator in that regard. It also has some bitmap graphics abilities, like photoshop, but again they are quite limited. Aimed at web designers.
Adobe Contribute® - I think this is some crap for collaborating with other people in an office setting.
Adobe After Effects® CS3 Professional - Makes your amvs pretty.
Adobe Premiere® Pro CS3 - Makes your amvs.
Adobe Soundbooth™ CS3 - Audio editing. Might be useful, but probably not. Replaced Audition, but I don't think its as powerful as audition was.
Adobe Encore® CS3 - Make dvd menus.

floatuponourtears · Post by **floatuponourtears** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:45 am

keep Premiere CS3, Creative Suite comes with the new Dynamic Link gizmo, it'll save you sooooo much pain while integrating between AE and Pr.

Jasta85 · Post by **Jasta85** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:51 am

is primiere pro CS3 a significant improvement over primiere pro 2.0? i have a couple unfininshed projects in 2.0 so i didnt want to switch over right now, but if it does make working with after effects easier i guess i will

JediNight · Post by **JediNight** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 10:43 am

Zarxrax: Fireworks appears to be a replacement for Image Ready. The animated GIF portion seems like it was moved into Photoshop for CS3. Fireworks looks like it's meant specifically for creating web UI's or something, but to be sure it seems like they have a decent amount of overlap going on between some of their programs in this suite.

Adobe Bridge seems like it's a beefed up Windows Explorer meant to help manage your media files and choose which Adobe program to open them with. Maybe some version control features as well for multiple people working on the same thing? Or is that what Cue collaboration stuff is?

Adobe sure can be confusing

Jasta85 · Post by **Jasta85** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 9:46 pm

ok, finally decided to keep after effects, photoshop, primiere pro and encore (in case i decide to burn any of my amvs to a dvd some day).

primiere pro cs3 seems to be very similar to 2.0 which makes me happy, trying to move all my projects over to it. Guess there's no reason to keep 2.0 around anymore, are all the features in it available in primiere pro pro cs3?

kenzuka · Post by **kenzuka** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 10:36 pm

Nearly all the feature are kept in premiere CS3. There are just some effects which are not present anymore like the radial blur. I did not do the listing of the effects of both versions, but I do not think that le number of suppressed effects exceeds 5/10. But CS3 is a lot more stable than pro 2.0, I have only had minor bugs with CS3, nothing that can be solved in more than 30 sec.

@Zarxrax: Like Jedinight said, Fireworks is oriented for web design, so it can create web page and such, create roll-over and a lot of other things that are web-design oriented. Fireworks, like dreamweaver and flash, was a software from Macromedia, before it was bought by Adobe. So there are a lot of fonctions that are present in Fireworks and Illustrator/photoshop because they were from the concurence.

Abobe bridge is used to mage all sort of media files, whereas contribute is used to automatically update you website/ blog..., and version cue allows you to manage heavy project af all kind (well only adobe projects) which need to be edited simultaneously by a lot of computers/users.

more details here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creatives ... moid=BONRU

DriftRoot · Post by **DriftRoot** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 12:32 pm

JediNight wrote: Adobe Bridge seems like it's a beefed up Windows Explorer meant to help manage your media files and choose which Adobe program to open them with. Maybe some version control features as well for multiple people working on the same thing? Or is that what Cue collaboration stuff is?:(

It's a lot more than an Explorer substitute. One AMV-friendly function of Bridge you may not be aware of is that, just like images, you can preview (play) video files with it. This means that if you have hundreds of clips laying around that you're trying to figure out will be useful or not (or are the files you're looking for) you don't have to import them, open them up and play them in your video editing program. Just preview them in Bridge. Certain versions of ffdshow will cause this video preview function to crash and burn, though, so just watch out.

Also watch out for the amount of RAM Bridge uses. Older systems with 1GB or less of RAM will really struggle and even crash. It's a fantastic program, but it's also a resource hog.