In addition to shipping Creative Suite 3 and introducing its new Adobe Media Player, Adobe on Monday announced free public previews of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional and Adobe Soundbooth CS3 software, components of the recently announced Creative Suite 3 Production Premium, which is expected to be available worldwide in the third quarter of 2007. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is a major upgrade to the company’s nonlinear video editing software tool. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is a major upgrade to the company’s nonlinear video editing software tool for visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing for film, video, DVD, the Web, and mobile devices. Adobe Soundbooth CS3, released last October as a beta, is a new innovative and intuitive audio software tool for creating and editing audio and fixing common audio flaws using visually-oriented tools. All products support Intel-based Macs, while Adobe After Effects CS3 is also available for Macintosh as a Universal Binary application.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth and adoption of our professional video, audio and motion graphics tools over the past year and want to offer our customers a taste of what is right around the corner with Production Premium CS3,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “These public previews are packed with new features and workflows that will enable new levels of expressiveness and productivity over multiple mediums, and we hope our open approach will help customers kick-start some really innovative new projects."

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 beta

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 now includes Adobe OnLocation CS3 with Adobe Encore CS3 enabling direct-to-disk recording and monitoring for a more efficient workflow. In addition, the release offers new features that streamline the editorial process: time remapping allows dramatic slow and fast-motion effects creation using precise keyframe control and real-time feedback as well as advanced frame blending. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 also includes the ability to author once and deliver to multiple media formats, including high-definition Blu-ray Discs, standard definition DVDs, and Web-based experiences in the SWF format for playback in the Flash Player. Adobe said that OnLocation CS3 and Encore CS3 are not included in the public previews, but will be available when the final products ship in summer 2007.

Adobe is offering a freely available, downloadable and installable preview of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to "enable customers to more easily transition to the latest hardware platforms, particularly Apple's new Intel-based systems."

After Effects CS3 Professional

After Effects CS3 Professional includes new features for animation and visual effects, along with integration with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. The new Shape Layers tool allows flexible drawing and animation of vector shapes with the ability to add and animate strokes, fills, gradients and vector effects. In addition, the Puppet Tool provides a new approach to character animation by giving the user the ability to squash and stretch images or text as an animated character.

The After Effects CS3 Professional beta is available to After Effects 7.0 users (users must provide their serial number to get an After Effects CS3 preview serial number to enable the software beyond the two-day grace period).

Adobe also released an updated beta of its Soundbooth application. Adobe Soundbooth CS3 enables creative professionals to quickly record, edit and create pristine audio without requiring training in sound production. Tight integration with Adobe Flash and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 enables Adobe Soundbooth CS3 users to easily remove noise from recordings, polish voiceovers, and customize music to fit a production.