I made a trip to New York for the B&H Photo classes on AfterEffects.  I didn’t have the money to fly there but fortunately my wife works for JetBlue and I get to travel free.  So I flew on the red eye from Salt Lake and arrived at about 6:30 local time.  After eating and hanging around the JFK for a few hours, I took the subway into downtown New York.  After the classes, I went back to the airport, had dinner, and flew home.  It was exhausting but I brought my own food so all I had to pay for was the subway.

The classes changed my world.  CS4 links all the parts together making it much easier to work.  For example, I can work in Premiere, link the clip to a composition in After Effects, make my changes, and go back to the Premiere window and see my changes updated.  Any change I make in After Effects will automatically update when I look at Premiere.

Photoshop can be brought into After Effects and the layers used there.  This is very helpful in doing motion graphics for titles, etc.  I can also link a sequence in Premiere to an Encore project and burn a DVD, with or without menus.

Perhaps the biggest realization was that this suite is fully capable of editing a full-lenth feature.  Rather than using Vegas and exporting clips to After Effects, then rendering the clip and importing it back into Vegas, I could skip all those steps.

Price was an obstacle.  CS4 Production Premium goes for about $1600.  But I found an upgrade at Newegg.com $760 and a copy of CS3 Web Premium for about $300.  That gave my wife Photoshop and her other favorite tools for her computer and the Production Suite for mine.

– Rich Pulham

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Adobe CS4 Production Premium. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.