Adobe’s annual product cycle marches on. In fact, you could almost take the yearly refresh of Adobe’s entire portfolio as an indication that summer is on its way, the timing is so regular. Fortunately, Production Premium CS4 has plenty of new features – it isn’t just a mechanical rollout.

It can’t afford to be, either. Some competitors for Adobe’s video products have fallen by the wayside, such as Avid’s Liquid.

But far more significant has been the radical re-pricing of Avid’s flagship video-editing app, Media Composer. And with Apple’s Final Cut Studio coming in at half the price, this is no time for resting on laurels.

Adobe certainly hasn’t been twiddling its thumbs. While there are no new apps in the Production Premium CS4 bundle, the key components all see significant improvements. Video editors have a variety of bundle options to choose from, too.

Aside from the Adobe Master Collection CS4, which gets you every Adobe app with CS4 in its name and a few that don’t, the Production Premium suite reviewed here includes After Effects CS4, Premiere Pro CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, Flash CS4 Professional, Illustrator CS4, Soundbooth CS4, OnLocation CS4, Encore CS4, plus Bridge and Device Central CS4, with Dynamic Link to bring the whole lot together.

The final option is to buy Premiere Pro CS4 on its own, which is supplied with OnLocation CS4 and Encore CS4 in the box.

One thing is missing from this list: a new version of Ultra, the virtual set tool that made its debut in CS3, following Adobe’s acquisition of Serious Magic. In fact, it’s been dropped entirely in order to bring the PC and Mac versions of the suite in line.

It may be expensive, but there's little you can't do with this excellent software suite.

So what’s new? At launch, Adobe made great play of CS4’s hardware-acceleration features. There was already a limited range of GPU-accelerated transitions in Premiere Pro CS3, but now the hardware assistance has expanded in Premiere Pro CS4 and also to After Effects CS4.

It’s claimed that Premiere Pro’s motion, opacity, colour and image-distortion engines all benefit from acceleration, while with After Effects you get faster depth-of-field and turbulent noise, although this app has already benefited from OpenGL-accelerated previews for some years.

Initially, however, the new hardware acceleration will only be available with CUDA-enabled graphics equipment. This means Nvidia cards from the GeForce 8000 series onwards plus a recent CUDA-supporting driver, or Quadro FX cards using the same GPU generations.

Our test system was equipped with a Point of View Nvidia GTX 280 graphics card and Nvidia ForceWare driver 178.13, but any GPU acceleration benefits weren’t immediately obvious.

You can also add the RapiHD plug-in to Premiere Pro to massively speed up H.264 encoding, but again, the hardware you can use is limited, this time to CUDA-capable Nvidia Quadro FX cards, and availability of the plug-in hasn’t been announced anyway.

This is all very well, but probably the biggest benefit of the new Production Premium CS4 suite is the extended integration between apps via Dynamic Link. The ability to edit in After Effects, and see the results in Premiere Pro and Encore immediately, really improved the CS3 workflow.

Now things work in reverse, with changes made in Premiere Pro to one project showing immediately in After Effects. Similarly, Premiere Pro projects can be imported into Encore CS4 and Soundbooth, with the same round-trip editing ability.

This interoperation has also been extended in other areas. For example, 3D layers from Photoshop Extended can be manipulated as 3D objects in After Effects.

You can export After Effects projects as files, which can be loaded in Flash CS4 Professional with layers preserved, so you can animate in After Effects then add interactivity in Flash for use on the web. And the ability to edit in Soundbooth now includes After Effects and Flash CS4, as well as Premiere Pro.

But it isn’t just pure features where this suite impresses; it’s the value for money it offers. It checks a few more boxes than Avid Media Composer 3, which has no Photoshop-grade image editing or Illustrator-grade vector graphics.

And if you just use Premiere Pro and After, the CS4 bundle upgrade is well worth the money, if only for the AVCHD support and Media Encoder. It may be expensive, but there's little you can't do with this excellent software suite.