Category: cs4

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State of the Union for AVCHD: Premiere CS4, MotionBox, VoltaicHD and AVCHD Lite

I thought it would be good to take a quick look at how support for AVCHD video has progressed over the last year. When I first wrote about AVCHD back in June 2007 there was very little support, cameras had been out for quite a few months but with no real support for the AVCHD format, not even within Sony’s own Windows-only Vegas editing software, never mind any kind of Mac support.

Since then however support has improved and there are quite a few options for working with AVCHD and cameras are in widespread use. Here are a few notable developments surrounding AVCHD video format.

Adobe Premiere CS4

With the release of Adobe’s new CS4 suites brought back a Mac OSX version of Adobe Premiere CS4. What is interesting about Premiere CS4’s AVCHD support is that it is native and doesn’t require any conversion of the video footage when importing. Interestingly it will also support playback of mixed media types all in the same timeline.

Premiere was the first digital editing software I ever used and in it’s day was awesome. This new release does sound like Adobe have made some great improvements and have made a worthy rival to Final Cut and Avid.

Here’s a few links relating to Premiere CS4:

MotionBox Announces Full Support for HD Video Format (AVCHD)

MotionBox is a video sharing site that was the first to implement support for uploading AVCHD format video. It’s actually quite a handy way to share video online and in the process convert your AVCHD video clips as MotionBox will also create Quicktime compatible MP4 versions of your video for your computer and your iPod.

Here’s a link to the feature announcement on the MotionBox blog:

Shedworx’ AVCHD applications – VoltaicHD, RevolverHD and FlamingoHD

I’ve blogged about the Shedworx applications a few times, but where would many owners of AVCHD cameras be (especially the early adopters who bought them in late 2007!) without VoltaicHD?

Although VoltaicHD was originally just a Mac OSX application it has also been available as a Windows PC version for some time too. Among the many benefits that VoltaicHD brings is a low cost way to edit video on Mac, especially for users on older Macs running PowerPC chips that aren’t supported by either iMovie 08 / 09 or Final Cut Studio. Windows PC users can also edit HD footage from their AVCHD camera for a low cost by using VoltaicHD and Windows Movie Maker. VoltaicHD has helped make AVCHD a practical format for video editing.

Shedworx are soon to release the first version of a media management application called FlamingoHD which is intended to complement VoltaicHD and provide management and workflow of HD footage.

Here are links to the VoltaicHD and FlamingoHD product pages:

AVCHD Lite

AVCHD Lite is a new variation of AVCHD which supports only the lower 1280x720p HD format. It actually uses a variation on regular AVCHD so many applications may require a software update to support cameras using the Lite variation. AVCHD Lite is generally targeted as a format for small point-and-shoot digital cameras that take a step up to HD video from the regular 640×480 standard definition video found on many of these cameras until now. Panasonic’s Lumix ZS3 and TZ7 are examples of cameras using AVCHD Lite.

Here’s a few links relating to AVCHD Lite:

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Adobe unveil Creative Suite 4 on 23/09, AIR for Linux, Flash Player 10 Release candidate

Adobe will be unveiling the next version of their Creative Suite software on the 23rd of September. This will be done via a special web broadcast, you can sign up for email notification via the following webpage – http://adobe.istreamplanet.com.

Details of any new features have not been revealed but Adobe did release public beta versions of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth on the Adobe Labs website a few months ago.

Adobe AIR for Linux beta released on Adobe Labs

Support for the Linux operating system has been increasing from Adobe with continual improvements to the Linux version of the Flash Player plugin. Now Adobe have fulfilled their promise of full cross-platform support for their AIR runtime with the release of Adobe AIR for Linux beta.

Flash Player 10 release candidate on Adobe Labs

A new release candidate of Flash Player 10 was released on Adobe Labs. If you haven’t already checked it out then there’s quite a few new features such as 3D Effects, a new text engine, enhanced drawing API, GPU support and enhanced sound APIs to name a few.

Once you’ve downloaded it then go an check out the Feature demonstrations page to get a taste of these new features.

One thing to keep in mind though, if you a frequently upload images and video to sites such as Flickr, Vimeo and even Adobe’s own Photoshop Express web apps then you’ll want to avoid this version of the Flash Player just now as there’s still a ‘bug’ which affects the uploaders for these sites. It seems to be a hotly debated issue just now but it appears that Flash Player 10 stops these kinds of image uploaders from working due to a new security restriction. You can catch some of the discussion on this Flash Player thread.

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Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth CS4 Betas now on Adobe Labs

Following on from last years move of offering a public beta of Photoshop CS3 Adobe have announced three new public betas of their CS4 applications.

You can download betas of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth CS4 from labs.adobe.com. You’ll find all the details of the new features in development on each application’s page, here’s a few notable feature headings for each application:

Dreamweaver CS4

  • Related Files – included files such as CSS, JS, PHP etc show in a bar at the top of the document making it easy to see what’s linked into your page.
  • Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks – improved support for JavaScript core objects and primitive data types. Work with popular JavaScript frameworks including jQuery, Prototype, and Spry.
  • Subversion integration – Use Subversion repositories directly within Dreamweaver.
  • New user interface – Updated user interface in common with the rest of the CS4 apps

Check out Dreamweaver CS4 on Adobe Labs →

Fireworks CS4

  • New user interface – Updated user interface in common with the rest of the CS4 apps
  • CSS and Images Export – Design web pages in Fireworks then export web standards-compliant CSS layouts, complete with external style sheets in one step.
  • Live Style improvements – When you update a style all elements the style has been applied to are instantly updated.

Check out Fireworks CS4 on Adobe Labs →

Soundbooth CS4

  • Arranging audio files on multiple tracks
  • Adjusting tempo and pitch
  • Recording and polishing voice-overs
  • Previewing MP3 compression quality

Check out Soundbooth CS4 on Adobe Labs →

Head over to http://labs.adobe.com now to check them out. Please note that these betas are only available to anyone with a valid CS3 suite or application, you will need to provide your serial number in order to download the beta versions.