So you read all the great reviews of Adobe’s CS4: Production Premium and you went right out to your local Best Value Software Megaplex to pick up a copy. Now you’re realizing that getting a little training for the package would be a good idea. There are a number of online and DVD-based training companies out there, so which one would suit your needs the best?
Well, in this issue of MFM, we’re going to take a look at Class on Demand’s entry into the CS4 Production package: Basic Training for Adobe CS4 Production Premium (BTACS4PP). The host is Emmy Award-winner Tim Kolb, owner of Kolb Productions and a long time TV/commercial creator.
Tim Kolb has a pretty laid back personality that doesn’t take himself too seriously. (To give you a feel for his somewhat self-deprecating humor, he starts the training out with a short video clip of him reading through the last of the CS3 material and congratulating himself on becoming an expert on CS3, only to be told by an off-camera assistant that CS4 has just arrived.) His concise way of putting things makes it easy to follow along with his training and he doesn’t try to cover too much, so that even complete beginners will find it easy to follow along.
While not technically a comprehension area, it would be wise to essentially bring up ease of use in this first section. The entire program is essentially designed in Flash 9 and plays off of a DVD. In the past, I’ve found Flash on DVD to be jumpy and problematic. However, the encoding they’re using in this DVD set plays back cleanly and easily, with no problems in jumpiness.
With that said, there are no resizability features, so you’re essentially stuck with a large playback window, which makes it difficult to see both the training window and the software you’re using. Additionally, you can’t set the training window permanently “on the top” of your workspace, like you can with a DVD training set, further preventing you from using the training at the same time you’re following along.
Aside from an overlay chapter selections, there are no special multimedia shortcuts in this set, such as user defined book marks like in Total Training’s offerings. As such, I’m not quite sure why this set was created in a Flash format as opposed to as a simple DVD set. Creating a simple DVD version would allow the training to be made permanently visible and allow the footage to be resized easily.
