Hmmm ... The NAB Show is starting in Las Vegas (see earlier post), and it's been about a year and a half since the last release of the Adobe Creative Suite, version 4 (in October 2008).
Adobe has just announced Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5), due to ship within 30 days (see press release). This is the next generation of Adobe's collection of design and development tools, spanning the creative workflow across print, web, video, interactive and mobile.
Adobe will be broadcasting its global launch event online on Monday, April 12, at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST. You can register online to view the event live, and to see the top new features of each CS5 suite, Photoshop, and the new CS Live online services.
Unlike some companies that keep all the details of new products super secret, Adobe is relatively open in sharing important information with its customers. For example, Adobe has previously released beta previews of several related components of CS4 and CS5 on its Adobe Labs site, including the new Flash Catalyst tool for interactive design without coding, and the new Adobe Story collaborative script development tool.
In addition, last October Adobe alerted its customers that Premiere Pro and After Effects will be accelerated as 64-bit native applications in this next release, and would therefore no longer support 32-bit operating systems. This was a continuation of the evolution to 64-bit processing that has occurred over the past several releases of video production tools and operating systems, and will allow users to edit much larger clips and work between multiple applications much more efficiently.
So, to get you in the mood, here's a sneak peek video of the amazing new content-aware fill feature in Photoshop (YouTube) -- This goes way beyond the healing brush to make entire trees disappear against a complex background, with just one brush stroke.
See my article, Summary: Adobe Creative Suite 5, for a breakdown of the tools and suites, and highlights of what's new with the CS5 applications.
See my earlier article, Summary: Adobe Creative Suite 4, for more on the CS4 suites and individual applications.
See summaries of video applications and versions in my Video Editing Software Gallery.
Find the Adobe CS4
Production Premium
and
Master Collection on Amazon.com