Streaming Learning Center

Steve Jobs was the greatest product innovator in the last couple of centuries, and his passing saddened me significantly. My appreciation goes back to his storied commencement address at Stanford University, which revealed him to be a deep and thoughtful man. I stand in awe of his incredible string of product successes, including the original Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, and Apple App Store—not to mention Pixar—as well as his ability to produce maniacal, passionate fans. But that doesn’t mean that I personally like every product created under his watch or agree with every product-related decision.

So, Adobe announced that it will showcase Production Premium Creative Suite 6 at NAB prior to its official release sometime in the first half of 2012. What’s in it for you and me? Well, I worked on my first job with the beta and received a briefing from the company, and here are my high level observations regarding the Premiere Pro bundle. I’ll keep this brief and hit the high notes, and hopefully convince my editors to support a more lengthy first-look review with benchmark testing.

Here's a video I produced for OnlineVideo.net on using Premiere Pro's Ultra Key and Garbage Matte. It's an intro- to mid-level video that applies the effect on three videos of varying complexity. The good news? One video is of a (fully clothed) lovely dancing lady. The bad news? The lady's face is not showing (those pesky permission issues) and the other videos are of me.

All joking aside, if you've never used Premiere Pro's Ultra key and you plan to do so in the near term, the tutorial is worth a look.

Adobe announced today that it will have Creative Suite 5.5  ready for shipment by June 30. The retail price for the Production Premium suite is unchanged at $1,699, with upgrades from previous versions starting at $399. I wrote a quick news piece for StreamingMedia Magazine that you can read here, and interviewed two members of Adobe's product management staff in videos that you can on this site by clicking over to the main article.

I shoot pretty much exclusively in HD now, but often render to SD DVDs. When it comes to choosing a sequence preset for Premiere Pro, I have two options, native HDV, which is the format that I typically shoot in, or 720x480 widescreen to match my DVD output. Which is better? Well, the quality difference isn't significant, but it is noticeable, and using a 720x480 sequence and shrinking the HDV video to match produces better quality.