Adobe Production Studio. Just breathe.

Okay.

For what­ever rea­son, I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion when I bought CS2.

I some­how failed to realise that Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice hav­ing any­way) and more (Pre­miere, After­Ef­fects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Cre­ative Suite 3 is launch­ing later this month though I don’t know if that means the next ver­sion of Pre­miere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before pur­chas­ing Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio, which means I get CS3 ver­sions of the stuff I actu­ally use — Pho­to­shop & Illus­tra­tor — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDe­sign, GoLive, etc. Acro­bat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acro­bat 8 because of relatively-late acqui­si­tion of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about, though I’ve hap­pily used it for var­i­ous things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hope­fully they’ll launch a new ver­sion of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My rea­son­ing is that liv­ing at home & study­ing = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not los­ing money on it, but it’s not some­thing I’d be able to afford to do if I were depen­dent on reg­u­lar income for rent, or what­ever. Speak­ing of reg­u­lar­ity, John C & I ran job inter­views yes­ter­day and decided to get one of the appli­cants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actu­ally going to be Mak­ingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and sta­ble — not in a finan­cial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluc­tu­ated a bit depend­ing on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obvi­ously sta­bilise a lot as I move back to cut­ting code and actu­ally see­ing it develop!

Any­way. Can’t wait.

# by Josh on March 22nd, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
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Adobe Production Studio: Back in Mac

I dis­cov­ered this today. It upset me.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 4, 2007 — Adobe Sys­tems Incor­po­rated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that the next ver­sion of Adobe® Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio, the inte­grated video and audio post­pro­duc­tion tool set that is part of the Cre­ative Suite fam­ily, will be avail­able for both the Mac­in­tosh and Win­dows® plat­forms. Film, video and web pro­fes­sion­als cur­rently using Adobe After Effects®, Adobe Pho­to­shop® and Adobe Illus­tra­tor® on the Mac will soon be able to har­ness the power of com­pletely new Mac­in­tosh releases of Adobe Pre­miere® Pro, Adobe Encore® DVD and Adobe Soundbooth™ — all key com­po­nents of an upcom­ing mile­stone revi­sion to Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio. The soft­ware will have its first pub­lic demon­stra­tion dur­ing the Mac­world 2007 Con­fer­ence and Exhi­bi­tion at The Moscone Cen­ter in San Fran­cisco, Jan­u­ary 9 – 12 (Booth 901). The next release of Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio is expected to ship in mid-2007.

Are they try­ing to con­vince me to buy a Mac? Ever since some­one showed me what you can do with Objec­tive C and Quartz to any video source on a Mac I’ve been wish­ing it were prac­ti­cal to buy one and use it for every­thing I wanted to, but couldn’t bring myself to con­sider FCP on account of lack of snazzy inte­gra­tion. Ah well. I’m sure some­thing else will crop up before the elusively-dated “mid-2007″ to help me reconsider…

# by Josh on January 21st, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Apple juice

Spent most of this after­noon absolutely rag­ing at an iMac. They’re unsta­ble, buggy, pieces of crap and any pre­tense at sim­plic­ity is entirely unfounded. Sev­eral behav­iours (or lack thereof) are alto­gether ridicu­lous — even Win­dows man­ages to do photo thumb­nail­ing & pre­views bet­ter, and, yes, it’s a PC. Take that and shove it up your “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” com­mer­cials — I can’t use Excel, but I can sure as any­thing see what pho­tos I have on a CD when I throw them in my drive. Sigh.

I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Win­dows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s expe­ri­ence, per­haps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like apply­ing for a credit card (for prac­ti­cal rea­sons, not just “silly-season” con­sumerism), but I won’t, yet.

Also had fun this morn­ing send­ing a hun­dred and fifty dol­lars (or there­abouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite any­thing so spec­tac­u­lar, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If any­one wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feel­ing this invest­ment may prove prof­itable some­time in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morn­ing was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality elec­tri­cian skillz, know­ing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for cer­tain usage. Or something.

Mind you, I’m no par­tic­u­lar stranger to blow­ing the­atri­cal lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of per­haps twenty par 64’s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site man­ager reck­oned they hadn’t needed replace­ment in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rat­ing on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.

I should prob­a­bly just leave the lights alone for a cou­ple of months so that I spend enough time work­ing to afford video things — which would, recur­sively, cause the same prob­lem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.

# by Josh on December 6th, 2006 Tags: , , ,
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