Adobe is going launch the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 via a special web broadcast on September 23. You can sign up right here. It looks to be a major release with updates to most of the suite. Video professionals can look forward to things like better integration between After Effects and Premiere Pro, as well as text translation and ACVHD support in Premiere Pro. Adobe seems to be hitting hard on this whole text translation thing as web reports have that feature in both Premiere Pro and Soundbooth. The Avid community had an idea to use Soundbooth to transcribe audio files. If this is anywhere near accurate then it might just be a killer feature of CS4 as producers are often too cheap to pay to have their interviews transcribed. I’ve watched those producer’s jaws drop when they see Avid ScriptSync at work as it lines the transcripts they do have with their video footage and the next question is .”can it transcribe to?”

The web guys are getting updates with new versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Photoshop CS4 will of course have new features and I would guess that the other apps like InDesign and Illustrator will see updates as well. It’s a very busy Adobe that can release so many refreshed and upgraded products all at once. One thing that Adobe probably won’t do is slim down the creative suite so it is less of a bloated mess of unused products and more of a lean suite of quick-launching and fast-moving applications. When I did a full install of CS3 I saw this nightmare of folders in my application directory:

Holy cow that is a lot of stuff I have never touched. And it never fails that every time I ever open any one of these things the hated Adobe Updated launches and want to install (at the very least) a camera raw update.

When I see that thing jumping in the dock I want to shoot it. There’s a web-site called Dear Adobe. It’s sole purpose is to give users of Adobe products a place to rant (and if you really want you can rave too) about the entire Creative Suite. It’s a real time waster at the least but at the most I hope it is something that the engineers at Adobe have taken a serious look at when designing CS4.