Along with the “big 5” (Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, Illustrator, and Photoshop), Creative Design Suite 5 Web Premium ships with several other major programs: Fireworks, Flash Builder 4 Standard, Contribute, and Acrobat Pro.
Flash Builder Standard is a program for developing “back-end” connections to programs that process data, and is not part of Web “design” per se. Contribute is Adobe’s contribution to content management systems (CMSs). This book focuses on working with more widely implemented open source CMSs, like Drupal (see #22, “Connecting Dreamweaver to a CMS Site,” and #23, “Formatting CMS Themes,” both in Chapter 3). Adobe Acrobat Pro is used to create PDF files.
In addition, Web Premium ships with programs that could be called utilities but are very useful in creating and publishing Web content. We’ll focus on those in this chapter. In addition to Device Central (see #8, “Previewing in Live View and Browsers,” in Chapter 1), the most valuable (and underrated) utility is Adobe Media Encoder CS5. In a world of fast-changing online video standards, Media Encoder converts video files to a wide range of other video formats. We’ll also explore Adobe Bridge, which has useful tools for preparing photos for the Web.
While it has not been possible to explore Fireworks in our limited space in this book, in this chapter, I’ll show you how to access particularly useful Fireworks features from Bridge.
Adobe Bridge serves as kind of a Grand Central Station for coordinating files used in different design projects. Bridge is somewhat tilted toward print design—in part that’s because Dreamweaver handles most of the “coordinating” role for Web projects that Bridge plays for print projects. But you can survey more information about your files in Bridge than is easily available through your operating system’s file management tools. Photographers use Bridge to batch import, name, and add metadata (like camera information to date).
Bridge is a stand-alone application; you launch it like any other application. It opens with file navigation on the left (viewable in either the Favorites or Folders panel) and a large Preview section in the middle with four views (Essentials, Filmstrip, Metadata, and Output), all of which produce different displays on the right side of the screen. Like other CS5 applications, panels can be viewed or hidden using the Window menu. The Path bar, new to CS5, identifies a breadcrumb-like trail to reveal folder locations in your operating system’s file manager.
You can use Adobe Bridge to browse, view, and organize files, but I advise against editing, moving, or renaming files for Web projects in Bridge. Those changes do not coordinate with settings in your Dreamweaver CS5 Web, and changing filenames or properties in Bridge can corrupt your Web site (see the “Warning” sidebar).
Although I advise extreme caution in doing any file editing for Web projects in Bridge, there are some tools that can be big timesavers, if applied with care. One is you can rename sets of files. For example, to prepare images for the Flash CS5 Professional Advanced Slideshow template, the images need to be named image1.jpeg, image2.jpeg, and so on. You can do that renaming in Bridge by following these steps:
Select the files to be renamed in the Content window of Bridge.
Figure 97a. Setting up the Batch Rename dialog to generate new filenames image1.jpeg, image2.jpeg, and so on.
One of the most useful and powerful features of Bridge CS5 for Web designers is the ability to generate a Web gallery. Web galleries (essentially slideshows) are various ways to present sets of images, and all of them work well in Web sites. Bridge CS5 includes some nice new Web Gallery templates, along with the ability to save custom galleries.
To generate a Web gallery, follow these steps:
Figure 98a. Selecting files for output to a Web gallery.
Figure 98b. Adjusting thumbnail size, and previewing a Web gallery.
Adobe Fireworks CS5 is an illustration and design tool that somewhat straddles the vector/bitmap worlds that are the domain of Illustrator and Photoshop respectively. Bridge provides access to a fairly substantial set of Fireworks features through batch processing—where you select a set of files and apply changes to all of them.
To apply batch processing in Fireworks to a set of images, first select them in the Content tab in Bridge. Then, follow these steps to access different batch-processing options:
Figure 99a. Adding files to the queue for batch processing.
Figure 99b. Batch scaling, sharpening, and converting images to grayscale.
Adobe Media Encoder converts just about any media (see the sidebar “Support for Many More Formats in CS5” for exceptions) to any other media—and not just Adobe media files (like Flash SWF or FLV). You can extract a high-quality print still from a video, strip an audio soundtrack out of almost any video file, and batch-convert a video to a dozen other video formats and settings to satisfy viewers in any environment—even Apple iPhones.
As a way of introducing you to Media Encoder’s magic in our little bit of remaining space, I’ll walk you through a recipe for converting a video from another format (like QuickTime MOV, Windows AVI, or Adobe’s Flash Video (FLV) format to an iPhone-ready h.264 video. You’ll be able to substitute your own conversion output specs into the recipe to create video for other environments.
Follow these steps to convert a video to an iPhone-ready h.264 file:
Figure 100a. Defining an output format.
Figure 100b. Choosing a preset to fit video onto an iPhone viewed widescreen.
Figure 100c. Viewing video conversion progress.
3.147.72.74