Adobe will demonstrate Production Studio suite for Mac OS X at the Macworld conference in San Francisco next week. This is the first time that the suite has been produced for Mac OS X. With it you get After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Encore DVD and Soundbooth.

Is this important? In a sense, yes. Graphics of any sort are easier on a Mac than on an Intel PC. Which may sound like heresy coming from an Intel PC user. But it is so.

It is proved every year in Australia. In a one day event an assortment of journalists are issued with Canon video cameras, access to an extensive wardrobe and told to go forth and make a movie in the morning. Then a light lunch and they come back to a roomful of Macs where they edit the raw video into viewable movies. While they are not going to be widely screened some of them are seriously watchable.

The same experiment has been carried out with an Intel PC instead of a Mac and the results were sheer, stark, staring disaster. No video ever eventuated.

The Adobe suite is for working primarily with still photographs but the same rules apply. Ask any creative artist or designer which computer they would prefer to work with and you will find there is no contest.

The Adobe decision is a reflection of the fact that while the Mac may not be gaining market share so that it revels in the glory days of the past it is increasingly getting street cred which is partly the iPod affect — anything we rub it against turns to gold — and partly the new possibility of running Windows biased programs if you simply have to.

The writer is not a Mac enthusiast and does not have an iPod.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 7:19 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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