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Adobe cross media workshop

May 19, 2009 | By Fayez Ali

On 11 May 2009, Adobe organized a workshop on cross media called ‘Creative brilliance meets productivity.’ The workshop was conducted by three specialists, Karl Soulé in digital video and audio, Paul Burnett in flash and web, and Michael Stoddart a sales manager who specialises in design. The whole workshop was an exercise to demonstrate the development of Creative Suite 4 for cross media publishing. CS3 launched in early 2007 was an also an attempt in this direction and also an overdue replacement for CS2.

Workshop on cross media organised by Adobe was conducted by specialists - Karl Soulé in digital video and audio, Paul Burnett in flash and web, and Michael Stoddart a sales manager who specialises in design

In the first half of the day-long event, they used applications in CS4 to develop media for a restaurant using their own specialization editions. Karl used production premium to make TV commercials, Michael used design premium to make menus and visiting cards and Paul used Web premium to design a website. In the second half the content that was made earlier was repurposed for other media for example the commercials that Karl had made were integrated into a flash website and the menus made by Michael were put into the website made by Paul.

Some of the more interesting CS4 features demonstrated on the day were the first time harnessing of graphic processing units of workstations to speed up processing of images. CS4 now also has OpenGL support which also has an impact on processing speed of images. Even opening multiple windows and artboards no longer slows down the system according to the demonstrators. There is no need to write CSS for webpages as fireworks does this automatically and the code looks quite clean. Along with OpenGL, CS4 now has an open source AJAX framework developed by Adobe. Photoshop has content aware scaling that allows changing of object proportions while protecting other areas and even adds bleeds.

The most significant features observable in CS4 were the integration of all the applications across the suite, the way in which content developed in one application was used in others. The ability to add layers to content allows the same content to be used for different media.

Adobe has commissioned a report from Pfeiffer Consulting called ‘Adobe CS4: Marketing perspectives, productivity and return on investment.’ The report brief consisting of three parts was distributed at the workshop. The first part discusses the post digital media cloud, which it concludes takes the best from both analog and digital worlds. This means that analog media is not dying out as is demonstrated by the proliferation of blogs on the Internet. The second part compares CS4 with CS3 and earlier versions. The comparison is in three categories – integration and productivity, web design with the ability of auto CSS generation, and in design with object positioning and preflighting. The last part of the report speaks of on investment per workstation basis and investment scenarios.

In all it was an efficient and comprehensive marketing exercise by Adobe to promote CS4. The workshop was attended by people from different sections of the industry such as media channels and software companies. The only concern is that the experts recommended a 64-bit operating system for optimal use as they have now started using the GPU to add to their processing speed, which means upgrading your hardware and operating system to a 64-bit architecture.