A Bridge not far enough
Adobe is making a big noise about the new file-management system called Bridge that comes with Production Studio. Bridge also features in Adobe's Creative Suite 2 bundle and, according to the company, is based on the File Browser introduced in Photoshop 7.0 - though we're not sure we'd have based anything on that particular browser. But Bridge, says Adobe, "goes a step further by providing centralized access to your suite project files, applications, and settings".
Frankly, though, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. The idea of Bridge is to offer ways of categorising files, to make them easier to locate - and, in so doing, to provide a more powerful way to browse for files than Windows' own tools.
However, Bridge is slow, has a tendency to steal system resources and seems one of the most buggy elements in the new Production Studio package. Worse, it's as though Adobe set out to do a fresh take on the wheel and came up with something that was midway between square and circular.
The Bridge browser is reasonably usable and useful for still images. Trouble is, the search capabilities of Windows Explorer seem easier to use and at least as powerful until, of course, you start properly using Bridge's categorising and sort tools. But it needs to be remembered that plenty of image-editors and inexpensive dedicated image-managing programs have excellent browsers.
Bridge is okay for managing
stills but a disappointment for video & audioWhen things start to get video-specific, they initially look brighter but are, in some ways, much worse. Bridge at first looks to hold out a lot of promise for video and for audio, too. The applet offer a truly useful preview of video files within a folder - just click on the file's thumbnail image and watch the footage on a mini monitor. Sound clips can be auditioned the same way. So, for those two features, Adobe, thank you. Also, some metadata for the active file is displayed just below that little monitor and that's a good, if far from original, idea.
But Bridge, it seems to us, is very much work in progress, falling down down in a number of areas. For instance, we couldn't find any options to easily arrange uncatalogued video files in logical ways, such as by type or size. So, when we were browsing folders with mixed content (typically AVI video files and audio files each with its own related ancillaries), and wanted all the AVIs together, we were shocked to discover that, seemingly, there is no way within Bridge of doing that.
Moving around the folder from one video thumbnail to the next often meant travelling between files that were a screen's height apart or sometimes more - requiring multiple scrolling actions.
Despite its monitoring
capabilities for video and audio, Bridge seems very much
like work in progress When files are arranged in column view there are still no additional sorting options. Unless, that is, you count the furtive right-click Reveal-in-Explorer option that opens the current folder within Windows' own file manager – something that often felt like a blessed relief and which we increasingly found ourselves using!
What's plain sad, too, is that Bridge remains so heavily biased towards still images. It is possible to filter a folder's contents so that only certain types of files are shown. However, while these include graphics files, camera raw files and vector files, there are no sorting option at all for video or for audio.
And, although Bridge does have a potentially very useful section that displays metadata, this doesn't include the sort of information about files that any half-serious video editor is likely to need. As a minimum, we'd judge that to be the pixel resolution and the audio and video data rates, plus, ideally, the video Codec used.
Things are no better for audio files – there's not even any clue about whether a file is mono or stereo, never mind giving info about its data rate, Codec or anything else.
If critical information is not provided for video and audio files - and seemingly it's not – users of Adobe's Production Studio suites will still need to keep on using free or shareware utilities to discover these critical facts about the thousands of video and audio files that are scattered over their multiple hard disks and which they'll want to edit or repurpose. And that, surely, kind of defeats the whole point of Bridge?
So, to coin a cliche, this seems to be a Bridge not far enough. But what about Dynamic Link?