Trialing Adobe CS5 Production Premium

The other day I downloaded Production Premium from Adobe, the latest offering of their Creative Suite. With all the bickering between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe's head honcho Shantanu Narayen over Flash support, I kinda forgot about the CS5 launch and it took me a week or so to remember it had actually finally launched, missing out on NewEgg's 100 bucks off pre-order deal : [. Anyway, I downloaded the trial anyway, which comes in at ~7.5 Gigs, but with a decent connection it came through on the Akamai pipeline in under an hour and a half.

Firstly, if you're a bit of a design geek like myself, you might like to check out some of the CS5 Branding that has already been blogged about in depth by Veerle's Blog. It's interesting, and personally I like it. I actually really like the new splash screens.

Anyway, the biggest change for me was Premiere and AE are now 64bit native. I've been getting into some editing and effects and it makes a huge difference to have those applications have the ability to more than use 4GB of RAM. I actually think Adobe ha been very late supporting 64bit operating systems, since Windows 64Bit has been out for forever it seems. Anyway, other than that, Premiere has a new playback engine that is really nice, but if you're an editing dork, you probably know all this.

Some things to check out with Photoshop, which has some really cool improvements particularly with painting:

Adobe TV

http://tv.adobe.com/product/photoshop/

Be sure to check out "Content Aware Fill" which has a bit of a Wow factor about it, although I don't know how much I'd personally use that IRL. I really like the new brushes, color selecting and paint mixing.

The biggest let down for me is probably the change (or, should I say non-existent change) between Flash CS4 and Flash CS5. I believe Flash is now integrated into the Suite better and they've added Flash Catalyst (which tbh I haven't even opened yet) and tried to make Flash easier to use for people with zero programming experience. I guess I was hoping for better use of RAM and some new drawing tools, and the ability to rotate a drawing canvas and things that would help people like myself who use Flash as a drawing tool a lot of the time.

Anyway, that's all for now. Adious.