Adobe Digital Video Collection: Cost-effective, Tightly Integrated
When choosing software for a digital media curriculum, there are always two
major issues to consider: the presence of the software in the industry and user
community and how “teachable” the software is. On both counts, Adobe’s
Digital Video Collection is an attractive package to help students master digital
video.
The Digital Video Collection includes four applications, Adobe Illustrator,
Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects.
As a group, these four packages’ strongest benefit is Adobe’s uniform
interface. Although there are differences in the interface to match the different
functions of each program, once a student becomes familiar with the basic characteristics
of the Adobe interface, each succeeding Adobe product is easier to learn. In
addition to uniformity of interface, these four packages reap the benefit of
being from the same company in other ways, including a fairly seamless exchange
of files and maintaining the integrity of layers.
Individually, the packages also have advantages. Illustrator holds the lion’s
share of today’s vector-based illustration market. While its use in creating
digital video can certainly be questioned, the value of being fluent in Illustrator
cannot be over-stated. If your only focus is on digital video production, you
may find Illustrator the most underused application of the package. But if your
focus is broader, the inclusion of Illustrator makes this package a economical.
Photoshop is everywhere. Every digital artist, whether a layout artist, Web
designer, 3D animator, or video artist, uses this powerful raster tool. With
each version of Photoshop comes more power and more versatile features. Unfortunately,
this added versatility comes with a price: the days of a sleek image editing
application are gone; so are the days of getting by with minimal RAM.
If you’re using an older machine with 64Mb of RAM, you probably will be
more frustrated than empowered with Photoshop 6. The tools are also becoming
so diverse and so deep, teaching Photoshop 6 can feel a bit like trying to teach
someone to weed their flowerbed with a bulldozer. Its easy for a student to
become bogged down in the myriad options and flexibility of the Photoshop toolset.
Plan on spending some time becoming acquainted with this program’s dark
corners and how to back out of them, because you’ll inevitably find your
students there.
Still, with new features like resolution-independent vector outputs, the entertaining
liquify command (a sort of image putty), and a new ability to effectively manage
layers and text, you’ll find the added time learning Photoshop 6 has big
payoffs.
It would be hard to claim that Premiere (the video editing component of the
package) is the end-all-be-all of digital video. As the gap between high-quality
broadcast video editing and desktop video editing has narrowed, several powerful
and elegant packages have emerged, leaving Premiere to play catch-up. However,
with version 6, Premiere comes into its own with the NLDV Firewire revolution.
Using any G3 or G4 Mac, or any PC with a Firewire (IEEE 1394) card, Premiere
allows for full NTSC video capture. The editing of this DV-compressed video
will enable students to work with and output broadcast quality video from the
start rather than the traditional 320x240 projects of yesteryear.
Perhaps the most powerful selling point of Premiere is its scalability as a
teaching tool. Although Premiere 6 will permit Single-Track editing, it will
also allow students to work in the A/B Editing workspace. Students should learn
Single-Track eventually, but A/B editing is such an intuitive and visual way
to edit that here at the University of the Incarnate Word, we often teach everything
that our beginning 3D animation students need to know to assemble their 3D projects
in one session. The transitions are easy to understand, timing and sound fall
into place easily, and students see immediate success.
After Effects is just plain fun power. True creativity emerges when students
get their hands on this compositing package. Although perhaps not the industry
cornerstone, it is widely used. It is a great way to get students started in
multilevel time-based media. The production bundle comes with robust filters
that can be combined in dynamic ways to create a look and feel unique to each
student. “Intelligent caching” makes workflow smoother and helps with
RAM-challenged machines.
Both After Effects and Premiere are powerful programs that need large amounts
of RAM. Adobe recommends miniscule amounts of RAM and storage space for these
two packages, but its hard to maintain momentum when students can’t keep
their machines from crashing, or can’t output their files due to lack of
RAM and hard drive space.
Students well trained in these four packages will be well trained in tools
seen everywhere in the industry. You simply cannot escape the reach of Adobe
in the digital media world. If you are working with dated hardware, upgrading
to this package may not be the best choice, but with good hardware, and time
to explore its new and powerful features, the Digital Video Collection from
Adobe is becomes a potent teaching package.