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Adobe CC – positives and negatives?
Hi,
We are on the verge of switching to Adobe CC and I just wanted to ask those with experience of it about it’s highlights and drawbacks. I’ve done some research but as with anything you find reports that are both positive and negative, so I thought Creative Cow would the best place to ask for opinions.
We mainly do fast turnaround, fairly small corporate films, company profiles, testimonials, that type of thing.
Many projects involve a certain amount of After Effects and Photoshop work, which is why I’m thinking Adobe Bridge could help our workflow speed. At the moment we use a combination of Avid, After Effects and Photoshop, then Sorenson Squeeze to output. Avid is quite expensive for what you get (especially adding in Symphony plugins, Sorenson, and extra software to run Avid over a network to the price) and is difficult to fix when things go wrong. The workflow just using bridge sounds like it would be much quicker, something that is quite important to us.So I guess I’m asking what pitfalls should we look out for? We will be running it over a SAN, probably with mapped network drives to each suite. I’m aware this will take a bit more file management than with Avid, and we’ll have to keep the media cache locally on each machine, but any other problems I should look out for?
I’m also interested to know about the licensing – I believe you can install one copy on 2 machines (I think as long as they aren’t running at the same time?) but can you run individual apps separately? i.e. we have one copy of CC installed on 2 machines, can one machine use After Effects and the same time as the other is using Premiere, for instance?
Sorry for the long post! Many thanks in advance for any advice.
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7 Replies
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As far as Bridge goes, I’ve been using it for years, first as art director at a broadcast TV facility, where I successfully managed upwards of 300,000 files for our on-air News, Promotions, and Commercial Production departments, and now as a freelancer, doing everything from designing websites to creating technical animations showing how gel permeation chromatography works. Here’s a link to an article I wrote for the COW a few years ago – it is still relevant:
https://library.creativecow.net/bourke_joseph/magazine_27-Adobe-Bridge/1
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Hi,
Thanks Joe, that’s really helpful. I think we’ve pretty much decided to make the switch to CC soon and this just confirms that! Any pitfalls to look out for though?
Many thanks
Dan
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One of the pitfalls I’ve run into with Bridge is that not all file formats will take Metadata entry. If I remember correctly, TIFF files will not take it, although .jpg and .png files will. You will also run into the occasional burp in which when you right-click a file which normally takes Metadata, the “File Info” selection (which you would use to enter Metadata) is missing from the drop down. You can sometimes fix this by looking further up the menu for “Purge Cache for Selection”. Once you select this, it will purge the cache, and then the “File Info” choice will appear, allowing you to enter custom Metadata.
On the good side, you can also create custom Metadata templates, which would allow you to embed things such as copyright information, without typing it repetitively. I can’t really think of many things I don’t like about Bridge, but one of the amazing things about it is the ability to find the AE project which created your output file right in the Metadata, if you know where to look. Here’s a blog post from my website which walks you through the process:
https://bourkemedia.com/adobe-bridge-metadata-saves-the-day/
I’m sure you’ll find things you don’t like about Bridge, but the ability to tag with keywords, create custom notes right in the project files, and all sorts of other useful things, far outweighs the few negatives you’ll run across.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Thanks Joe, good to know.
I think what we’re going to do is use our existing project file structure (just a series of windows folders within folders) to keep projects organised, then the whole thing gets copied over to archive drives when wrapped up, so we should always know where the related Premiere/After Effects/Photoshop etc projects and assets are located. Maybe this won’t work or there’s a better way of doing it but I’ll have to try it and see!
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You’re on the right track, I’d say. File and project naming and folder structure are the keys to finding archived projects. The rest is just faster ways of finding things when the first steps are less than ideal.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Hey Dan,
So as far as my experience with CC, it’s absolutely wonderful to work with… however, it’s incredibly expensive, and a yearly payment. Even if you are a student, it’s still quite pricey…. and with the student pack, you don’t get all the pro features. Sorry if I am just rehashing anything that’s already been said, but those are my two cents. Good luck!
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Hey Daniel,
Thanks for replying, it’s good to get opinions from others who are already using it.
I’ve always liked the way Adobe stuff is designed, and we use CS5.5 currently (just for AE and PS really) at the moment. I used to use Premiere at Uni (back when it was CS3 I think) so would like to switch to that for editing. The cost isn’t too bad for us – we’re just going to get 2 individual licenses (as we have virtually no broadband in our location and the extra management tools are of little use to us as there are only 2 users). The cost of this compares quite favourably to Avid MC which we use at the moment, because we have to use extra software to get Avid to work over a network so the price per year would be almost the same – but obviously with CC we get After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition etc etc. and the advantage of bridge to work quickly between them.
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