Adobe Offers Premiere Pro, After Effects Betas

In addition to shipping Creative Suite 3 and showing off its first Apollo application , Adobe has released public betas of Premiere Pro and After Effects for Windows and Mac users.

Adobe announced in early January that it would bring Premiere Pro -- the company's professional video editor -- back to the Mac. Together with its companion product Encore CS3, Premiere lets you author once, and then output to Blu-ray Disc, DVD and Flash SWF for the web. Premiere Pro also supports additional delivery platforms including Flash and mobile devices.

Premiere also has a visual flow chart, which will help users build disk navigation through drag and drop. Users can choose automated menu generation or they can build menus in the Photoshop file format with the Photoshop technology built into Encore. Buttons, text and images are stored as layers and layer sets so you can edit them later in Photoshop.

The preview of Premiere Pro is available for Mac OS X 10.4.9.

After Effects CS3 is also available as a public beta from Adobe. After Effects includes several new features including Shape Layers and the Puppet tool. The application now has the Brainstorm feature, which allows users to naturally evolve animation variations based on parameters you choose.

After Effects will be available as a standalone product, or as a component of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Master Collection software in mid-2007.

The After Effects CS3 Professional preview is available to After Effects 7.0 users worldwide. It is available to licensed users of either the After Effects 7.0 Standard or Professional (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Video Bundle (full, upgrade, and education) or Adobe Web Bundle (full, upgrade, and education). You will need to provide your After Effects 7.0, Production Studio or Bundle serial number in order to get an After Effects CS3 preview serial number, enabling you to activate the After Effects preview and use it beyond the two-day grace period.

Both applications are available from Adobe Labs .