Though only using a testing version and not having the chance to look into everything in detail, I have been playing around with the CS5 suite and getting to use some software I was curious about but never touched before. Overall for those who don’t like to read through an entire article. Some welcome changes but not worth the huge price to upgrade in my opinion. Basically you seem to be paying mostly for more stable software, which for the most part it is. Stability should be a bug fix for free, not a paid upgrade.
The biggest disappointment is Premiere Pro, it had issues with sound, rendering, exporting you name it. I was hoping to use it in place of updating Final Cut Pro. I like some of the new ways things are set up and the media exporter integration is very nice, but if the final product is missing sound or if it takes 5 times as long to edit something because of render issues, it’s a step back not forward. Soundbooth was a new one for me and it’s excellent, though I was hoping for better ability to make music from clips like sound track pro has. Could just be unrealistic expectations on my part. After Effects is fine, I haven’t had any footage to try the new rotoscoping features. So far I haven’t had reason to switch from my CS3 version. That could change if I get deeper into it. EDIT: many of these issues did not appear when I started a project from scratch as opposed to importing an older project. Many of the issues may be a result of importing older versions that already have rendered files associated with them.
Photoshop, as usual, gets the best updates, the content aware fill is nice but not perfect, a good start for a complicated fill job. Like content aware scaling, I suspect the feature is less useful than it is impressive (when working on an ideal file for that feature) in the real world. The new paint brushes and colour mixing features are quite amazing, many artists will really profit from them. Best thing is the constant crashing seems to have stopped from CS4.
Dreamweaver STILL has the same text not visible issue I’ve had since Apple updated to Snow Leopard and Adobe has not been able to do anything about for over 8 months. Dreamweaver CS3 does not have this problem. Indesign is nothing to write home about and frankly, it’s a shame, not because adobe doesn’t have a great layout program, bit more because it’s almost impossible to get printers to update the software. Many are still on CS2 and you can only save to one version behind. So no matter what Adobe does, unless you work with all up to date print companies, the latest version sits on computer opening any indesign file you click on despite telling the finder use an older version. (A very annoying bug!)
Fireworks, finally stable, Flash... like the Flash Catalyst idea except that older versions of Flash did this very thing with components in effect, without having to leave Flash. Illustrator has some nice updates, but the main one, the perspective drawing is a little premature.
Encore I like a lot, it’s got a learning curve if you are used to other similar software but the end product was really professional.
Not sure I’d pay the upgrade of close to 1000$ (canadian) for what amounts to a few new features and one additional software I’d like to have (Encore).
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