"On several instances BEL has responded to emergency service calls and saved important meetings."
- Mark L. Wiswall, Computer Sciences Corporation

So, I've been really liking Adobe products lately. I've been using Adobe Premiere and Photoshop since both were version 5.0. Those were both released in 1998. Now, almost nine years later, I'm using what's called Adobe Production Studio Premium. Think of it as a streamlined workflow in a box.

With Adobe Production Studio Premium, you get Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects Professional, Audition, and Encore DVD. These products combined creates an extremely flexible workflow. I spent this weekend producing a video for Delaware Today's Home Design Reception. Granted, I'm only working with a collection of photos and artwork, but that can be a bigger challenge than simply editing video together. I always try to obtain the highest quality source material possible. For artwork, this means Illustrator, Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), or some other vector format. Vector artwork allows the image to be scaled infinitely with no loss of quality.

The Adobe workflow allowed me to create title slides in Illustrator, and then simply import the Illustrator document into both After Effects and Premiere Pro. I also saved my photos as Photoshop documents, and used those in my Premiere Pro session, as opposed to simply laying bitmaps, JPGs, or TIFFs. Why? Using Photoshop documents allows me to keep layers separate while editing. It also allows me to easily make changes to the source.

Finally, I was able to import Photoshop documents directly into After Effects. This created for me a composition with my Photoshop layers already laid out. Then, I could immediately start animating. This saved me from having to save each layer as an individual file, then import each, and then arrange them as they were in Photoshop. It was all done for me. It even kept my layer blending such as drop shadows, outlines, etc. It rasterized nothing!

The time saved because Adobe's products all work seamlessly together is unfathomable. To top all of that off, Adobe recently introduced Bridge. Bridge allows you to preview and manage your projects from once central place. VersionCue helps keep track of different versions of documents. Combine all of these, and your work just got a whole lot easier.