It's a preview, dummy!
Despite the fact that this article resides in the reviews area of our site, we would re-iterate that it is a preview, not a review. That's because the software bundle we received was a beta, circa October 31, 2005, and we don't write reviews about betas. Doing so is counter-productive, as well as being somewhat deceitful.
In the comings days and weeks, therefore, you need to take care when you see anyone telling you they've written a review of any new element in Adobe's latest suites, because what every one of them will have done – unless they specifically say otherwise - is write a review after having hands-on with a beta.
That said, judging by the general stability of the suite (and while admitting we hardly gave After Effects or Encore DVD much of a work out), it's possible there isn't a huge different between our beta and the shrink-wrap you'd end up buying.
There's a second reason for this being a preview – not that one's needed. Asking anyone but a genuine expert to properly review After Effects and Encore DVD is a bit like expecting a one-armed mini-cab driver to flight-test the latest jet fighter. It might be possible but innocent third parties are likely to get hurt.
And, therein, lies one of the problems we see with these and preceding video-centric suites from Adobe. Many prosumers and keen amateurs will prefer to stick with programs that are MUCH easier to use, even if they lack some of the power that Adobe offers.
Truth is most of the effects that most of them will want to implement can be achieved using Premiere (even more of them in Pro 2.0) or in some other well-spec'd video editing programs.
It's widely acknowledged that After Effects is a beast of a thing. To get on top of it, never mind master it, requires a lot of time and a very good reason to make that commitment.
This makes us wonder whether, in fact, Adobe hasn't got the composition of the Standard Production Studio all wrong. We don't think it's such a bad thing for Encore DVD2.0 to have been left out because, like After Effects (Pro or Standard versions), it offers many features that will be necessary to no one other than professionals - and it's far from easy to use.
Lots of authoring programs – even sub-£50 cheapies - offer 80 per cent or more of Encore's features and do so within interfaces that are very much easier to get to grips with. That ease of use extends to the way that the different elements of the authoring process are presented to the user - one step at a time in a logical, methodically, pre-arranged workflow – with Ulead having set the ease-of-use standard.
Who Encore DVD will appeal to - and who is most likely to make the effort to learn it - are pros who take their authoring very seriously because large sums of money are involved. But, once we got comfortable with Encore DVD's absence from the standard suite, we got to wondering what After Effects is doing in there. Okay, the make up of the two suites is almost certainly intended to ensure that the Premium suite looks far better value than the Standard. But even if that is the case, we'd anticipate Adobe being able to sell many more Standard suites – and no fewer Premium suites - if the lower-priced of the two Studio packages brought together Premiere with Audition and Photoshop.
Mind you, the way that Adobe talks about the features on offer in the Production Studio bundles, it would be easy to get the impression that it no longer expects to be selling its video suites to anyone except full-time post-production specialists. If that is the case, suite sales may turn out to be even more disappointing than we believe is likely because of the composition of the Standard suite.
Adobe's change in attitude became apparent when the company changed the terms under which its moving-image suites were supplied for OEM sales - as DVdoctor exclusively reported. The suites had been selling in big numbers at very keen prices when bundled with relatively inexpensive video-editing hardware, such as the Matrox RTX family of PCI cards and ADS Tech's external editing boxes.
Worryingly for Adobe, though, there are probably rather fewer post-production types than prosumers and committed hobbyists looking to buy video suites. What's more, most of the likely pro audience would appear to be quite strongly wedded to other software, notably Avid and Apple's Final Cut Pro, so Adobe has a bit of an uphill struggle ahead no matter how good its programs turn out to be.
