After Effects has also been updated, with 32 bit color (per channel) and HDR support, i.e. the ability to work with a much expanded dynamic range for video.

Exotic?

No, many people have used 3rd party HDR support for years to create visibly much higher quality effects, very visible even in 8-bit output.

Much improved user interface that even lets you undock outside of your main application window (this is mostly for those with Dell 24" and larger screens :O),

OpenGL 2.0 preview and final rendering can speed things up quite a bit.

Adobe Bridge integration, AE within Premiere without rendering, the Lens Blur and Smart Blur from Photoshop, and lots more.

Not the Second Coming, but worthwhile for the many here who use AE with Vegas.

Native M2T rendering is the new feature that caught my eye. Maybe someday we'll get this in Vegas (sigh).

Allowing tools to undock outside of the window is good for dual screen users as well, especially if you really need the space but also need to see through to reference documents while working.

Forcing users to expand adobe apps to completely cover two screens isn't always acceptable.

Vegas has been far, far more flexible in this regard.

Rob Mack

All good. The GPU accelerated rendering is part of the promise of the PCI Express graphics bus. Equal throughput both to and from the card. Yes, Vegas should be making use of this when it's available, especially if it can actually be done in a hardware agnostic way.

The clip notes feature is also something we've been interested in at our shop. It'd be nice if Vegas had a freely distributable viewer that could allow clients, PAs, interns, etc, to go through movies and clips and make timecoded comments, logs, batch capture lists, etc.

Rob Mack

cool. Dont know why GPU acceleration hasn't been available in vid apps YEARS ago (3d apps use it for acceleration, why can't video?), but the extra color processing is pretty useless for us home/small shop editors. Don't know about you but I'm not going to run out & buy one of those fancy 16-bit color per pixel monitors for an outragous ammount... I won't even buy an HDTV for what they're asking. :)

However, it's about damn time we see more then 8 bits per pixel! We've been stuck with that since SVGA came out!

"Native M2T rendering is the new feature that caught my eye. Maybe someday we'll get this in Vegas (sigh)."

As a PP user, I am NOT happy about this. Adobe has screwed Cineform over by removing a plugin that was already available in 1.5.1

For the cost of upgrading my pro collection, $1200 is freakin not worth it especially since I already have the creative suite 2 and from what I understand, I can no longer part out the dupe programs (Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2). So other than a LIMITED 4 cam multicam and Clip Notes (brilliant idea actually) theres no pressing need for users to upgrade. Definitely not worth a new version release. At best, another dot upgrade.

Well native M2T rendering is a cool addition, but I wouldn't want it at the cost of losing Cineform!

Some cool sounding features to be sure, some old, somenew, some updated. These are a few that caught my eye:

Expedite reviews with Adobe Clip Notes. Embed video into a PDF file, e-mail the file to your client to review with timecode-specific comments, and then view comments mapped to the timeline.

Create high-quality, menu-driven DVDs directly from the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline. Make full-resolution, interactive DVDs for digital dailies, test discs, or final delivery.

Control video decks through RS-422 and RS-232 serial protocols or FireWire for precise batch capturing, recapturing, and insert editing.

Preview widescreen footage on a 4:3 monitor or lay off to a 4:3 tape or DVD with real-time letterboxing. Ensure that your 16:9 material looks right during playback.

Some of the rquirements were misquotes I think by someone above - they were saying that older processers would not work. From what I see it depends on what you want to edit -

Intel® Pentium® 4 1.4GHz processor for DV (Pentium 4 3.4GHz processor for HDV; dual Intel Xeon™ 2.8GHz processors for HD; SSE2-enabled processor required for AMD systems)

Sounds like in you want to edit HD you need the AMD's that are SSE2-enabled.

List of supported graphic cards - Adobe Premiere Pro2.0:Graphics cards

EDIT - Also, FYI, on the Cineform codec - read the Cineform FAQ

Q: Does Aspect HD support both Premiere Pro 1.5 and Premiere Pro 2?

[SNIP]

Q: In the initial version of Aspect HD v4.0 there is one errata that affects exporting M2T files to HDV camcorders....

[SNIP]

Q: If Adobe and Sony licensed CineForm Intermediate, why do I need CineForm products?

I'm a bit confused (as usual): Doesn't Vegas edit M2T's natively now?

It does HVX as well I believe.

This is an amazing refresh of both After Effects and Premiere. It looks like you can float your windows around now. Check out the demo video on the premiere site.

I never thought I would give in to Adobe, but that Video Bundle collections looks like the most amazing modern multimedia software bundle in the world. The price isn't too bad if you add up all the components. Now if I could just find $2,000 under the sofa cushions.

I'm not going to run out & buy one of those fancy 16-bit color per pixel monitors

There is no need to upgrade your current 24-bit color per pixel monitor (8 bits per channel) to take advantage of the higher color depths.

Photoshop and AE Pro have had 16-bit per channel color for ages, and now 32-bit per channel is here (after having been used in many other pro applications for some time).

I am very happy about the improvements to the AE interface. Finally my other monitor has something to do. It was a real pain to have to keep moving the tools around so you could work.

Pretty cool that you can burn a DVD from the timeline(PP2). I like being able to burn a CD from the Vegas timeline. Seems like they ought to be able to do this. Encore looks graphically more friendly than DVDA-3. Plus looks like their templates are a little better than the very limited selection we get with DVDA themes. The slide show features address what we have all been doing with Ultimate S and Veags.

The thing that I most enjoy is the video overviews of the products (Total Training is doin them I guess). Makes the Adobe apps seem even sexier than they are.

-TomE

.. it's just another video editing package ... move along, folks ... there's nothing to see here ... Vegas will have it all and more in V7 ... if not, there's always Microsoft Movie Maker ...

I agree. Adobe always seems to be playing catch up with other NLEs. The ongoing joke is if you have a feature request, get Apple to implement it and it will be in Adobe's next version <grin>

Look at the feature list for Audition. It's almost line for line taken from Vegas'. :-)

Yeah, I saw their feature list. Whats funny is that in their brochure it claims Audition is UNRIVALED in quality and ability for audio editing. LOL.

edit:


"Superior audio editing in an NLE
The audio capabilities in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0—unequaled by any other video editor—now allow you to apply multiple effects to audio clips or tracks. Adobe Premiere Pro even includes a set of VST-format plug-ins that will get you started on audio enhancement right out of the box."

>The audio capabilities in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0—unequaled by any other video editor<

I would guess that PP's audio capabilities ARE unequaled. Why would Vegas aspire to come down enough notches to equal it? :-)

Gary

Touché!

I got a 3-hour demo of Adobe Production Studio 2.0 this evening, done by Adobe's top video developers and one marketing manager.

If you have any signfificant use of AE Pro today, it would be a crime not to upgrade to AE Pro 7.0 for $199. It was a no-brainer, based on saving a lot of work and being able to get better quality and being able to do more things, too. And yes, the dreaded "palettosis" is gone.

Premiere Pro 2.0? I don't know yet. One-click and float color correction, The UI is still ugly IMHO, but Charlie White at DMN said "this Adobe Video Collection has the best integration among a set of postproduction tools in the industry. It’s simply the most powerful interoperative application workflow I’ve seen." After having spent a couple of hours with it, I have to agree. Amazing. For example, do something in AE and have it immediately reflected live in PP or Encore DVD. Or vice versa + change something in Audition and it's updated live in PP or AE. Or ditto for Photoshop.

One flat out wonderful new feature was the diametrical opposite of the typical enthusiast's wet dream about "cool new stuff": Clip Notes.

When you want to show your footage to a remote client, you select Clip Note, which creates an ordinary Acrobat 7 Reader PDF file with a WindowsMedia or QuickTime render of your video inside, plus some info for the client (and optional encryption too).

Client sits on a beach in Hawaii, sets aside his martini and opens his Wi-Fi laptop and opens his new e-mail with your Clip Note PDF (he can even go to a public internet cafe and use web mail + the regular free Acrobat 7 Reader). The PDF gives him your instructions and starts a regular video player.

Client plays the video and presses the regular Pause button occasionally, writes a comment in a textbox under the player for each pause (timecode is entered automatically), then hits Play again. This finished, he e-mails the result back to the editor.

The editor Imports the Clip Note file from within PP, and voila, he now has markers on his original timeline, with the comments plainly visible.

This really beats sending timecode burns and getting back handwritten notes that have to be correlated.

PP finally does have full, working 10-bit video support as well as up to 32-bit float support. Astonishing DVD capabilities too. Full AJA and BMD support.

And GPU-accelerated rendering using OpenGL 2.0.

Both AE and PP did amazing things in realtime with this. Multiple PIPs and heavy Gaussian blurs? Simply fast, mostly realtime even on a mid 2004-era PC (remember those? :O). Adobe has a list of which video cards support "High Fidelity" final rendering, and it included several inexpensive common consumer cards from ATI and nVidia.

FCP is virtually guaranteed to show GPU-rendering at NAB, which leaves which NLE?

Perhaps MMS has thought ahead a little bit this time, we'll see. This really can be a monster time saver. With instant and automatic GPU-rendering, you can forget about RAM renders and pre-renders for 99% of most work. Even high quality final render, with effects, can be realtime... Imagine the reduced headaches for Vegas users.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) support in AE and PP is a dream that makes it possible to create amongst many other things really nice motion graphics with less effort.

Good ol' Cool Edit Pro, er, Adobe Audition, now mixes surround sound, supports Dolby, and allows use of a Photoshop style Lasso tool to snag unwanted sounds in a full color spectral view (2 dimensions, plus color to indicate frequency range) for example. This makes it possible for an audio-inept video editor to fix sound problems that would require quite a bit more skill in Vegas or SoundForge.

Audition also comes with nearly 5,000 uncompressed 32-bit music loops, plus a bunch of 15: and 30: music beds, all of it royalty-free.

Everything is currently shipping, and there should be free trial versions up next week.

No worries, from this glimpse only After Effects 7.0 was an instant no-brainer.
With PP, we'll have to wait and see, but it sure is a much stronger contender now.

Even several pro Mac users I asked said they would switch to PP if this software ran on the Mac, this is pretty remarkable! Adobe even said they are considering this port seriously.

Wow. Great info Coursedesign.

There are already some AE and PP web reviews popping up today I noticed. Lots of good reviews. PP does look pretty ok too, especially if you count the integration with the rest of the bundle.

The kicker for me is integration and discounts with Macromedia Flash, PhotoShop and Illustrator. All of which I have recently trial tested for my nickel and dime moonlighting business which has pretty much moved to web based only final format requests from clients.

Now the whole migration to Adobe is looking like a no-brainer for me, as soon as I get the courage to spend. I'll wait and trial the entire bundle next week when the demos are posted in the download section. Just image the creative media power of the Video Suite with the Studio 8 Flash and web design package... I may never leave my desk again.

I hope this refreshed competition wakes up the SonyMediaSoftware gang soon. A full migration to a new media platform would cost me a bundle... but afterall, you snooze, you lose.

I think PC editing is about to get smacked at NAB this year. Apple is offering a universal code base for their Final Cut Pro Studio componets for next to nothing that will allow usrs to leverage either the PPC or Intel architecture.

Adobe will suffer greatly from this considering their marketing and pricing blunders. What really pisses me off about Adobe is that they give absolutely NO credit for software you already own. I already own the Creative Suite 2 but in order for me to get Audition 2 and Encore 2, I have to get the pro upgrade for $650 while I get PP2 and AE7, I also get additional copies of Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2. Great and all but you cant part your software out like last time. All software componets are tied to the one serial number leaving me with two copies that do nothing for me.

I bought the download version upgrade of PP2 last night and played with it a bit. Im still convinced Vegas is the way to go though Adobe has improved in some areas. Clip Notes is an amazing idea and well implemented. This is definitely something Sony should try looking into.

However, Adobe did drop the HD DVD/BD ball leaving the door wide open for another NLE to deliver. No word yet from my source on why that was scrapped. My inclination is Adobe is waiting to see what Sony and Adobe announce before they move forward on it.

There are some nice new things about PP2. As much as I want to hate it, Adobe doesnt seem as inept anymore. Still some stupid decisions (ala removing Cineform and pricing upgrade schemes) Still, for almost two years since the last upgrade, I definitely expected a lot more from Adobe.

GPU rendering is going to be HUGE. I surely hope Sony has an answer as this will become the de facto standard for rendering and dare I say, encoding/authoring H.264 AVC authoring for HD DVD and Blu Ray.

AE7 is by far definitely the best upgrade of the bunch. If V7 turns out to be just as smashing and couple with AE7, I honestly believe there isnt anything in this world that anyone cant accomplish with both programs.