Chapter 12. Adobe Bridge and Adobe Production Studio

Coinciding with the release of Premiere Pro 2.0, Adobe released an entire suite of video-based products: Adobe Production Studio, which includes Premiere Pro 2.0, After Effects 7.0, Encore DVD 2.0, Audition 2.0, Photoshop CS2, and Illustrator CS2. Although it is an investment to purchase the full bundle, you won't need much additional software to complete your videos or films. You'll also have access to such extra features as Dynamic Link, which enables you to import an After Effects composition into Premiere Pro and have it update live in Premiere as you make changes to the source composition in After Effects. This chapter outlines a few of Production Studio's powerful integration features.

From every Production Studio applicationwhether purchased individually or in the bundleyou also can access another utility useful for integration: Adobe Bridge. First seen in the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on), Bridge is a file browsing tool that allows you to not only rearrange and search files on your system, but also add metadata to the files and run automated tasks. Whether you have the full Production Studio or Premiere Pro 2.0 only, Bridge can help you work more efficiently by enabling you to better organize, label, and run select automated tasks on batches of files. Production Studio operates on a creative level, touching all the tasks of film or video production, while Bridge operates on the file level, enabling you to edit metadata stored in any file so that you can search your system, share files, and preserve sensitive information, such as copyrights, intellectual property rights, photographer credits, and more.

To start this chapter, let's take a tour of Adobe Bridge, then I'll demonstrate the power of Production Studio.