The time has come for Adobe’s biggest software release ever to ship and shipping has begun. The Creative Suite 5 began shipping in just the last couple of days. If you buy before May 31 then you can get free ground shipping as well. For all of us video pros then the CS5 Production Premium is a good way to go. It’s $1,699 for the full suite or $599 for an upgrade. One very nice thing about CS5 is there is a free trial available so you can test it out before you upgrade or buy new. They’ll even mail you a trial DVD set for $9.99. The Mac demo weighs in at a bit over 8.5 gigs so it’s pretty large but not too much for a broadband connection to handle.

I was listening to some of the great NAB coverage from the Digital Production Buzz and there were speaking with Adobe’s Mark Randall (the April 15th show) and he said that the CS5 suite is one of the largest software releases ever, in terms of lines of code for a commercial software product. That’s big. Some might say too big in that the Creative Suites of past often seemed buggy in places and bloated overall. One thing an Adobe rep told me is they concentrated on slimming the product down a bit and making it seem a less bloated. We’ll see if that’s true. As long as the Updater application is less intrusive I’ll be happy. And remember to use the Uninstaller when it comes time to remove the demo and don’t just drag applications to the trash as its bound to place some of its needed resources in and around a system. But one thing you can be sure of is there’s some fantastic new features to try out.