Spring time heading into the summer is always expensive. First the Federal Tax + IRA bite, and the yearly renewal of my webhosting and many utilities love bite. Today was the Adobe big bite, upgrading from CS3 to CS4. These all adds up quickly.
I want to start doing more web video, for years I've gotten by with simple tools like Flash, Quicktime for edits. Since I'm starting to explore some multi-camera shots using the oddball codec (AVCHD) used in most digital consumer video cameras... it's time to upgrade to something a bit more real.
Premier wasn't the first choice. My last experience with Premier many years ago wasn't positive, clunky, unituitive. Being in LA my many video friends (all Mac based) swear by Final Cut Pro and AfterFX. But I couldn't justify buying a mac just for editing video. There is also Sony Vegas, which usually people love.
What swayed me back to Premier is the improvements since I used it last, and nifty features for dealing with multicamera shots: Premier can synch them, and even treat the many clips as one. Also the batch media encoder might come in handy.
So in the end, of the tools I want, these are the only ones I need.
- is Flash CS4,
- Dreamweaver,
- Photoshop,
- Premier
- AfterFx.
Oddly enough there's no package that combines those without putting a bunch of stuff in I'll never use, and no package with Flex and Flash that I saw. Buying products individually is hugely expensive.
So I had a choice.
- almost encompassing "Master Collection" (no Flex or Coldfusion)
- buying BOTH the of Web Suite Premium AND the Production Premium.
I went with the latter, which oddly gives me more (duplicate licenses) for like $200 less. Strange. All said damage $954. Not bad given the tools are largely what I look at most of the day.
I must say the shopping process is pretty involved, with all the places that one can come from in the entire history of Adobe and Macromedia to all the potential single and suite options, I don't envy the person who had to put together pricing. There is something like 201 options, between the normal the media only and the license only. Thankfully the main part does have a flash wizard to help narrow down the choices as what upgrades are eligible. The other part of the site was lame, like a drop down for the pages of results...like WTF? The flash based checkout wizard didn't respond correctly to the denied Amex charge, which required me calling in to say Adobe is not a fraud 
If you can't get the 20% discount, they have a $50 discount till May 31st if you opt for digital download. Which is happening as I type this, a Java based download manager taking care of the whopping 4.1GB for the just the main files, plus another gig likely for the extras, fonts etc. Coming off of Akamai it's going surprisingly fast. Already 28% done.
