For those of us who use any of the Adobe Creative Suites, the big news lately is the announcement Adobe made at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention this year. The company has upgraded Creative Suites to CS5.5. In my opinion the most significant part of the announcement was that Adobe will now make their various Suites available on a subscription or “rental” (call it what you want) basis. I’ll have more to say about that towards the end of this review.
The new features
Other than that, perhaps the biggest part of this upgrade is the “& Any Screen” feature. This allows the user to render video to multiple formats such as tablet (16x9), or smartphone and tablet for Wi-Fi. (Figure 1) This is a significant upgrade for those who create eLearning for these kinds of devices – that is, for Flash video. When you choose H.264 video, you get all kinds of Apple devices listed so you can render directly into the format that an iPhone, iPod, or iPad can use. (Figure 2) This is a valuable addition to the suite because encoding for portable devices took a lot more steps than the new Adobe Media Encoder now does.
Figure 1. The new “& Any Screen” feature in CS5.5 allows the user to render Flash video to multiple formats for phone, tablet, and WiFi.
Figure 2. The “& Any Screen” feature in CS5.5 also supports a long list of devices for H.264 video, including all the Apple devices that do not support Flash.
Some fine print
To be sure, not all the upgraded Adobe products carry the CS5.5 designation. Photoshop still lists as CS5, and so do Illustrator, Fireworks, Contribute, and Encore. Photoshop does include an upgrade from 12.0.3 to 12.1, but the same upgrade is also available for free to registered Photoshop CS5 users. The biggest upgrade is probably to the Adobe Media Encoder, which has more features and also now implements the “& Any Screen” feature. This is important for me as a video producer (and I’m guessing that it is important for developers as well), as I’m forever rendering for different formats and devices. The render engine also seems to be faster, but that test will have to wait for some real-world controlled tests of project against project in Premiere Pro CS5.5.
Audition replaces Soundbooth
There is one other important new feature: the inclusion of Adobe Audition instead of Soundbooth. Soundbooth was an audio editing program in the “spirit” of CoolEdit 2000; i.e., a small package of audio editing and correction tools, but not much else. Adobe Audition is a far more fully featured program for editing and correcting audio than Soundbooth.
If you like working with Soundbooth, when you purchase an upgrade from CS5 and leave Soundbooth on your hard drive, you can choose either program from the dynamic link menu on the soundtrack (right click). This is a very good feature for upgraders. Adobe discontinued Soundbooth with the release of CS5.5. Creative Suites CS6 will probably not support Soundbooth as a dynamic link.
The bottom line: no important differences
I’ve been using CS5.5 for a few months now and I can readily state that there are no important functional differences between Adobe Suites CS5 and CS5.5. This is an upgrade that’s full of little features that add up to a whole that’s greater than a few minor changes here and there.
The new subscription package
There is a new feature that’s not a software feature at all. It’s the availability of “subscription” pricing for all of the suites and individual software packages. How does this work? It’s rent. You subscribe to the software product or package by the month or year. Is this worth it?
It can be a good deal, but only under certain circumstances. Here’s a little math: If you’re buying an upgrade to say, CS5.5 Production Premium, the upgrade price is $399. If you subscribe to the package for a year, it costs you $1,020 or 2 ½ times the price of the upgrade. If you subscribe on a month-to-month basis, you’ll pay $129 a month or $1,548 per year, not including taxes. You can buy the full package for $1,699 and it’s yours forever. There’s really no value in subscribing except in some very special circumstances.
Here’s a scenario where the subscription makes sense: You’re an eLearning design company and usually contract with another company to do the development for your training. Or you could be any media company that doesn’t do development. Development is not your core competency. Now you have a project that you need to develop in house, and for security reasons you need a developer who can work with your computers on your network. The contractor cannot use his own computer; he must work on one of your networked computers. The project is going to take just under three months and then you’ll have no use for the software or the developer any longer. If you subscribe to Production Premium CS5.5 for three months, your cost will be $387 instead of $2,599 plus tax. That’s quite a difference. This is just one scenario where the concept of a subscription really works. But if you use any of the Adobe CS Suites or individual software on a day-in-day-out basis, then subscriptions are probably not for you.
Conclusion
Is this upgrade worth it? I really think it depends on your circumstances. There are some truly worthwhile reasons to upgrade. If you create media for a lot of different devices and screen sizes and you don’t use an outside product like Sorenson Squeeze (a standalone encoder that costs around $800), then this is probably a very worthwhile investment for your workflow. Improved workflow means you can do things quicker and that’s never a bad thing. Otherwise, you can probably wait for CS6 and not miss a thing.
