MacDirectory Magazine

Spring-Summer 2010

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/11584

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FIRST LOOK (evolved from Flex Builder) is an advanced application development environment that provides a very powerful feature set for data-driven applications and environments where a development team is working on a project. It can save FLA files as uncompressed and unpackaged as XML, allowing for highly granular version control (the XML schemas will be public). Flash Builder will be available as a standalone product. Flash Pro, of course, is still in the mix and offers a number of new features and ongoing interface improvements. Dreamweaver Dreamweaver CS5 is all about dynamic data making it even easier to work with CSS. The new Inspect mode lets you easily view and modify various CSS elements, highlighting them on the page and in the Code View as you work. You can preview tweaks to CSS style elements viewing their impact on a page in real time. A rather remarkable bonus is that the Inspect mode also works on remote sites: enter a URL in the address bar and Dreamweaver will load the relevant HTML, CSS and PHP code for your viewing pleasure. It will also let you view the generated code on dynamic pages. CS5 plays very nicely with third-party content management systems (CMS) like Drupal and WordPress and lets you run open-source services provided by Xampp and MAMP for in-house testing. Mercury Playback Engine: Video Star The good-news side of desktop video editing is that incredibly versatile video editing systems now can sit on (and under) a desktop. However, what is becoming a downside is that new, high-end HD formats like Red One 4K can easily overwhelm any real-time potential your system might have. Adobe’s solution is the Mercury Playback Engine, unveiled at Adobe Labs last year. The Engine’s goal is simple: real-time, render-free, full-screen playback regardless of the source resolution or number of video layers. To pull this off, the software more than a little help from hardware, which comes in the form of an NVIDIA the people at NVIDIA are hinting at some promotions to coincide with CS5’s release. The CS5 applications will take care of distributing the remaining CPU load across as many cores as your system has. Quadro FX 4800graphics card and lotsof memory (at least one of the product managers recommends 8GB as a baseline). But the result is like having a computer within a computer. This, of course, comes at a price. As we go to press, that price is still nearly $1,800. But Premiere Pro Beyond the Mercury Playback Engine, the changes to Premiere Pro in CS5 are rather modest. For the most part, they take the form of interface and workflow enhancements. Even though it already has a comfortable lead in this respect, Premiere Pro has greatly expanded its handling of tapeless editing. It has presets that go from the popular MPEG pocket cameras to Red One 4K as well as the popular DSLR video formats. As always, the program will let you mix formats on a timeline without complaint. Soundbooth Soundbooth CS5 has a greatly expanded library of sound effects (over 9,000) and 100 customizable, royalty-free scores, all of which are stored online rather than preinstalled with the application. Its dialog transcription tools integrate with On Location and Story, Adobe’s online script collaboration system for more accurate recognition and reconciliation of what was recorded compared to what was scripted. After Effects After Effects CS5 joins the other members of the 64-bit club and this obviously means longer RAM previews if you have the installed memory. It also adds an updated and expanded version of the Mocharotoscoping tool, which adds advanced object- based tracking and simplifies the export of tracking information to After Effects. The big news for After Effects CS5 lies in its own new rotoscoping tool, the Roto-Brush. This gives you nearly all the enhanced functionality of the Photoshop CS5 Quick-Select tool for full-motion masking. Adobe once again has been doing its homework. CS5 avoids the typical crunch of feature bloat by paying attention to what users have asked for and really sweating the details of the applications’ interface as well cross-application (and cross-platform) interoperability. With across-the-board 64- bit applications, Mercury Playback and the rest, the message from Adobe to Mac users is simple: It’s about time. MacDirectory 135

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