Videomaker by Brian Peterson

CS5 is among Adobe's most significant upgrades to the Production Premium bundle ever.

As video editors, we have patiently waited (and waited and waited) for tools that are as quick as our clicks and keystrokes. But performance gains in past versions of Adobe's Creative Suite have been mostly incremental. After testing one of the very latest pre-release versions, we can say that CS5 is nothing less than revolutionary. Our wait is over.

Since there is so much to cover, for now, we'll give you a taste of what's new and improved in the suite as a whole giving more attention to Premiere Pro. In our next review, we'll provide a more detailed analysis of the programs we know you use the most, like Premiere Pro, After Effects and Sound Booth. For the flagship programs in the Production Premium suite, this is Adobe's definitive move to the 64-bit operating system platform. While the other programs in the CS5 suite remain 32-bit, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop Extended and Media Encoder are native 64-bit only. Adobe does include 32-bit CS4 versions of Premiere Pro and After Effects for those of you that can't wait to harness some of the other benefits of the new suite.

This upgrade may be the excuse you've been looking for to buy new hardware, so be sure to check the Tech Specs. Even if you have enough CPU horsepower, there is a good chance your system will need (or can now fully address) more RAM. Most significantly, you'll need one of just a handful of currently compatible nVidia graphics cards to unleash all of the newfound productivity of CS5. Our test machine, an 8-core 2.33GHz Xeon with 32GB of RAM, included an nVidia Quadro CX card (performance details in our next review). read more...