6 Introducing Adobe Bridge

#6 Introducing Adobe Bridge

By the time you've finished with some complicated projects, you'll have literally dozens of audio, video, and still image files floating around, and finding the right content can consume valuable production time. Fortunately, Adobe Bridge, which is included in all versions of Production Studio, can help you to quickly zero in on almost any file you need.

Adobe Stock Photos

With over 750,000 royalty-free images to select from, Adobe Stock Photos is a great source of images for menus and other design elements. Bridge gives you direct access to the Adobe Stock Photos Web site, with the ability to search, sample, download, and manage your purchased images.

Bridge can display still image files and play audio and video files. I find it particularly useful for browsing through the many templates, behaviors, and presets offered with Adobe After Effects (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Adobe Bridge provides a great environment for finding and organizing your project assets and for previewing templates and other design elements from After Effects.

Simplified File Selection

If you access Bridge via the File > Browse command, double-click any file to load it into that host application. Or, as with Windows Explorer, you can insert a file into any Production Studio application by dragging it into the Project panel or equivalent.

In addition, it offers advanced search capabilities and the ability to insert metadata into a file. To access Bridge, do one of the following:

• Select it from your Windows Start menu to open it as a separate application.
  
  
• Choose File > Browse in any Production Studio application, and it will open automatically.