Adobe’s Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium offers significant upgrades for creatives working on both Macs and PCs.

Next week we kick off a series of reviews for the latest version 5.5 of Adobe’s Creative Suite (CS) collection. Announced at NAB 2011, the suite has gone on sale this week.

The software suite is so significant a tool in any creative’s work that we’ll be dedicating a number of articles and reviews to the package over the coming weeks.

I’m happy to note that S.D. Katz will be offering one of his highly regarded in-depth tours of the package. Steve, an author of Shot by Shot, one of the most popular film directing books of all time, brings many years of creative inquiry to his reviews, writing with a clarity that befits a screenwriter.

With Creative Suite 5.5, Adobe moves to “regular mid-cycle releases,” which it describes as minor upgrades every other year that alternate with major upgrades at two-year intervals. This brings a bit of clarity to how to think about the CS universe, which is actually five separate collections with many moving parts. We will concentrate on Production Premium, the suite that collects apps most relevant to moving media creators.

The programs collected in Production Premium? Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, After Effects CS5.5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Adobe Audition CS5.5, Flash Catalyst CS5.5, Flash Professional CS5.5, Illustrator CS5, Adobe OnLocation CS5, Encore CS5, Device Central CS5.5, Bridge CS5, and Media Encoder CS5.5.

Here’s Adobe’s page on Production Premium for more specific info.

If you’d like a complete comparison of the products available in the various packages, click here.

Here’s a short video on the overall Creative Suite package.

Audition, an enhanced version of the audio processing and editing app Soundbooth from Version 5, now works on both Macs and PCs. Once again the extensive integration between apps pays off for busy users. Without the time-wasting import/export cycle, you’ll quickly move individual audio clips and multitrack mixes or complete video sequences between Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition for editing and sweetening.

Photoshop, one of the major apps in any creative’s paint set, garnered significant upgrades in its prior version, including a capability of working with video in the Extended edition. It doesn’t gain a significant makeover here. However, one nice move: Photoshop can now be accessed over a network, which potentially makes it much more relevant for use in a postproduction environment.

Flash, which brings animation, video, and interactivity to web pages and increasingly smartphones, remains the subject of a pitched battle between Adobe and Apple. Whether you agree with Apple or not on this complex question—there are plenty of good points pro and con–Adobe points out that some 131 million smartphones are expected to have Flash Player installed by the end of the year. That’s a pretty good market beyond desktops, and you’ll have the full version of Flash Pro to work with here.

OnLocation offers sophisticated logging and metadata preparation for on set and on site production. The app can even scan imported media for problems such as audio pops and clipping and off-the-chart video highlights.

While not mentioned as a separate product, you’ll also find Adobe Story screenwriting software in the package. Story actually lives mostly on the web as a CS Live online service. You can find out more about it here.

Story stores script info and other metadata in an ASTX file (Adobe Story Interchange format). When you import a script into Premiere Pro, that apps speech analysis capability improves since it can compare the script to the project’s audio files. Once the script is synced to your edit, you can search the spoken text of your clips or build a rough cut using the script to mark in and out points. Story also runs on Apple’s iOS, so scripts (including various versions and revisions) can be tracked on a mobile device.

Dual-system DSLR production gets attention too. Premiere Pro’s “Merge Clips” function allows you to sync stand-alone audio files with video clips recorded on a separate device. Using in and out points, timecode, or numbered markers as sync reference, you can sync up to 16 audio clips to a single video clip.

The speed of Premiere Pro, when married with Nvidia’s Quadro series graphics cards, makes editing RED 2K material (you can handle 4K RED files with Nvidia’s top PC-only Quadro 6000) as well as 3D into a real-time affair. Click here for an Adobe video explaining how real-time 3D editing works in Premiere.

While there are a number of useful new features in the latest version of After Effects, many at the NAB demos remarked on the ease of camera stabilization via the new Warp Stabilizer. Click here for a demo.

What’s it cost? Production Premium CS5.5 lists for $1699, with good deals on upgrades from previous versions of the suite.

For productions that can bill against rentals and not purchases, Adobe helps budgeting by introducing a subscription plan. Options include either regular monthly payments or pay as you use. For more information about Subscription Editions, click here.

There’s much more to come, so check back on a regular basis.

Zeitbyte’s latest zeitCast video player handles multiple languages.

While Steve Jobs might be bad-mouthing Adobe’s Flash, the flexible code still plays most of the video found on the web. That popularity is one of the reasons that Zeitbyte Digital Media recently debuted zeitCaster 2.0, a Flash-based video player for the web.

This Chelsea-based media services company also shoots, edits, hosts, and streams video besides developing custom video players for top clients such as Universal Music Group. I previously wrote about Zeitbyte growing and adding staff which you can find here.

Zeitbyte wrote zeitCaster from the core on up so that they could include unique capabilities such as a CMS (content management system), which allows users to add metadata to stored data for enhanced search, etc. Over the next few weeks, Zeitbyte promises to deliver a plug-in playlist builder that can tag videos with metadata.

Another new capability—support for multi-bitrate video playback—solves a problem that can lead to confusing the user: you don’t want to repeat info for each version of a stored video. Instead, it should only show up once in a playlist, which is what Version 2.0 accomplishes.

The upgrade also adds a modular, plug-in architecture so that clients can build a custom player that only has the features they need; a capability of playing both live and on-demand files (allows you to simultaneously stream both a live feed and non-video info such as a live chat room that comments on the video); and flexibility for complex layouts (including chat rooms, photo catalogs and realtime Q&A).

New clients who will use the player include TDK, Con Edison and the Jeff Buckley Foundation.

By the way, if you are curious about the core arguments over the recent huffing and puffing between Apple and Adobe (i.e. HTML5 versus Flash), you might check out this short but informative interview with Zeitbyte President Gary Kahn.

Zeitbyte Digital Media is growing. The digital media services company, which recently moved into new Manhattan office space, has added Marcus Geduld, Jules Levitt and Anthony Nguyen.

Zeitbyte must be busy, as they provide a pretty wide range of media, online and video services including live event webcasting, video production services, custom media players, media encoding, media management and streaming.

Co-founder and company president Kevin Brail says the added staff will allow them to offer an expanded suite of services to clients, including custom video and audio players, with the goal of helping to create the “next generation of media players on the Internet.”

Geduld will serve as senior Flash developer, Levitt becomes sales manager, and Nguyen joins as lead designer.

Anyone working in After Effects might already be familiar with the name Marcus Geduld, as he’s published a number of books on AE including After Effects Expressions and After Effects for Flash. Marcus also presented several workshops at NAB’s PostProductionWorld on the apps.

Founded in 2006 by Kevin Brail and Gary Kahn, Zeitbyte’s clients include ConEdison, Kenneth Cole, Universal Music, UBS, Neiman Marcus, Phillips de Pury and Michael Kors.

Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer lead the workshops.

At the FIT campus on Tuesday, March 23rd you’ll have the chance to take two half-day workshops on streaming web production and Flash to be taught by Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer. One class shows how to create workflow for streaming video production and delivery, while the other details what you need t do to set up successful Flash delivery, still the most prevalent multimedia Web technology.

These two half days are about all the time you’ll need to get up to speed, as both these experienced teachers have produced plenty of their own work, and know most of the pitfalls you’ll come across.

Jan, as he notes on his website streaminglearningcenter.com, has “produced and encoded video since the CD-ROM days (1992).” I remember recruiting him to write for millimeter and then Digital Content Producer magazines. I had been reading his articles in PC Mag, and thought they were smart, cogent explanations of arcane technology. He wrote too in a refreshing, plainspoken manner that’s still not, unfortunately, the norm in many how-to tech articles.

If you want to go beyond learning one specific technology or software app to start to comprehend the whole streaming media machine of the Web, you’ll want to attend. If you want to directly sign up, go here.

Highly recommended.

If you’ve kept track of the tech details related to Apple’s iPad announcement, it’s been pretty hard to miss Steve Job’s dismissal of Adobe Flash for the new device—he’s already made known that it has no place in the iPhone OS.

It’s not personal, of course, since so many Mac-based creatives rely on Adobe’s justly top-of-the-heap Photoshop, After Effects, et.al.

You can catch up with some of Job’s arguments in Ryan Tate’s article in Valleywag which details what happened when Jobs presented the iPad to Wall Street Journal editorial staff

Flash, as Adobe seems to constantly point out, is nearly everywhere on the Web and installed in computers as well, helping to make the Internet colorful with animation and graphics. Jobs’ anti-Flash arguments are fairly well known too: that Flash consumes too many CPU cycles, presents too many security holes, and finally is an out-dated technology—something he doesn’t want forward looking iPhone and iPad users to contend with.

But while Tate describes Jobs’ as “brazen in his dismissal of Flash”, the reasons are more complex than those most noised about. John Gruber on his Daring Firelball blog says “the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn’t part of that.”

Even if those performance issues are finally solved, Gruber argues, Apple won’t include it in the iPhone OS since, as he believes, Apple wants to control that whole OS. Apple is keeping the iPad OS closed too, something that’s not been the case with OS X (for which Jobs has blamed Flash for a great number of Mac crashes and other flaky performance issues).

To replace Flash, Jobs and Apple are pushing the interactive capabilities in HTML5, an open source standard not controllable by any one company. (HTML5 is a huge rewrite of the code that underlies the whole Web, so it will be implemented over a very long–in Web years–12 year time frame from now, even though some minor capabilities are now working with a first considerable stage planned by 2012. There’s more about this complex roll-out here.)

But on 9to5 Mac, Seth Weintraub in a blog entitled “The upcoming Apple vs. Flash battle” says that bringing tools to market to build interactive applications rivaling those now on hand for Flash/AIR are “years away at best”.

While Weintraub agrees that the first mobile devices running Flash will burn through batteries, he thinks the situation will improve quickly with more potent CPUs and GPUs coming to market. This will actually benefit Apple’s rival Android, as devices with Flash “instantly have more “applications” on them than the iPhone.”

So all is not gloomy in Adobe-land. Even of more import to anyone creating graphics and editing video, says millimeter’s Trevor Boyer, is Adobe’s upcoming release of Creative Suite 5, which will charge forward with support for 64-bit operation only (OSX 10.6 or Win7 64) while introducing the Mercury Playback Engine, a completely retooled codec wrangler.

The latter will supposedly be a game changer compared to what’s currently available as it uses a computer’s GPU (i.e. Nvidia only at this point) and CPU in parallel to deliver capabilities including real-time debayering of Red camera files (Red sells a $5k card to do that now), native Red 4K multicam editing, and Red keying; speedy AVCHD playback and scrubbing; zipping through nine layers of P2 files at a time; and accelerated rendering for exports.

Mercury is set to support Geforce GTX285, nVidia Quadro CX,FX4800, or FX580, with newer nVidia cards added to the list as they are released.

At the moment all of that quick, speedy editing comes courtesy of Adobe’s upcoming CS5 Premiere NLE only (look for it in late Spring). Photoshop and After Effects will surely have speed ups of their own going 64-bit native and supporting Nvidia’s Cuda architecture, but so far the Mercury Playback Engine looks like an Adobe exclusive.

Whether that makes it any more attractive to Avid and Final Cut Pro users doesn’t look probable, but the technology, bundled tightly within the whole CS5 suite, could prove attractive to many more potential users worldwide. It should be especially tempting to those shooting HD with DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, and others; this fast growing contingent is one Adobe will be targeting with the new suite. And why not? They’re one group already overwhelmingly tied to Photoshop as their top app.

Mo Better Video on the iPhone

Vimeo’s video distribution service has gained a rep in the indie production communities and among bloggers as a favorite video-sharing and embedding site, with its clean, simple interface and good quality Flash encoding. Now, the New York-based company has added the ability to distribute to iPhone/iPod Touch and Google Android devices.

This past Wednesday Vimeo announced that its staff picks and HD video showcase, two of the most popular parts of the site, had been re-encoded to H.264. The next step, says Vimeo’s director of community Blake Whitman, is to extend iPhone support to all Plus members over the next few weeks.

Avid users include many pro types such as HDSLR pioneer Philip Bloom. The attraction? Rather than the free-for-all mix of high and low, rube and pro of a YouTube, Vimeo feels more like a self-selected club of supportive enthusiasts. This is especially the case among those who buy the Plus membership (the basic site is free). At $60 a year, perks include unlimited HD uploading and the ability to embed videos elsewhere in HD, while users self-police to make sure everyone sticks by rules such as postings uploaded only by actual content creators—no reposted TV episodes here.

Vimeo, part of Barry Diller’s IAC empire, will soon relocate to Frank Gehry’s iconic West Chelsea “sailboat” building. While the site faces competition from YouTube (which already re-encodes all uploaded video for smartphones), Vimeo prides itself on listening to its pro-oriented users closely. Expect the Plus site—which is already finding use as a dailies delivery system—to add future products that more closely address the needs of production professionals, says Whitman.