Upgraded to CS4

I've finally got around to upgrading my Adobe suite of software to the latest version - CS4.

I skipped the last release (CS3) so there's big differences in all of the applications.

It's great to finally have a working version of Adobe Bridge (the version included with Production Studio Premium was just hopelessly buggy). With thousands of stock footage and backgrounds to wade through it's going to be a massive time saver to be able to index it all in Bridge.

All of the apps are looking very neat - the user interfaces are much slicker and compact making better use of the available screen space.

I've just been playing with the Puppet Tool in After Effects and can see that's going to be very useful. Character animation is something I've always shyed away from in the past, but the puppet tool will allow me to tackle this in the future.

The Layer Styles and Shape Layers (which were introduced in AE CS3) are also going to be incredibly useful (although I find it unbelievable that it took this long to implement these very obvious features!)

It's a shame GridIron haven't released an update to allow Nucleo Pro to run in CS4, although I can understand them focusing their efforts on getting GridIron Flow released as I believe this will be a truly groundbreaking piece of software.

Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia has meant that Flash is included with the Creative Suite which will be very useful to have on hand, as I'm being asked to produce more and more video for the web, and whilst After Effects can produce FLV files, you need Flash to be able to produce a SWF file which is what clients expect.

The OnLocation video capture software which is included looks useful, particularly as I'm planning to invest in an HD camera later in the year.

I haven't had a chance to play with Soundbooth yet, so am looking forward to trying that out - I've been using a very out of date version of Wavelab for audio editing for far too long now and hope Soundbooth will provide an better alternative!