NAB 2012: Adobe CS6 Release

Adobe's booth at NAB 2012 was crowded from opening to close every day and Adobe Senior Product Manager Ellen Wixted thinks she knows why. "This is the year Adobe is in the limelight," she says. "We're delivering the right tools and we've been remarkably consistent. Plan-to-playback and multi-screen delivery is something we've been talking about for years, and now the industry is ready to hear it."

In particular, Wixted points out the new Premiere Pro and After Effects -- part of Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium -- are special draws. "This is the year Premiere is in the sun, and it's also the biggest After Effects release in years," she says.



CS6 Premiere Pro adjustment layers screenshot. Click image to zoom.


In the wake of Apple's polarizing release of FCP X, Adobe has redoubled its efforts to capture the hearts and minds of disaffected FCP editors. With the new version, the company is providing a dizzying host of new features that appeal specifically to professional editors.

Bandito Brothers' Jacob Rosenberg on the set of "Tinsel"

The new Premiere Pro also includes dozens of changes requested by users. "We have fixed the problems that editors didn't like by working with high-level editors," says Wixted, who names Bandito Brothers' Jacob Rosenberg, Vincent LaForet and Philip Bloom as just some of the editors who helped. "It was a sea-change for us. We're also cross-platform and looking to expand to support Open CL."

The user interface has been completely redesigned, by and for editors. "It lets you edit the way you want to," says Wixted. "The interface is highly intuitive and customizable." She also points out the added power in the Mercury Playback Engine, which upped performance beginning with Adobe Premiere CS5 and CS5.5. "This third release is a native 64-bit application," she says. "The Mercury Playback Engine is also GPU-accelerated and optimized for today's multi-core CPUs." The Mercury Playback Engine also now features improved support for third-party hardware. Adobe Mercury Transmit gives direct access to the Engine for partners that include AJA, Blackmagic Design, Bluefish444, Matrox and MOTU.

Premiere Pro 6 also offers features aimed at editors familiar with other editing systems: presets for Apple Final Cut Pro 7 and Avid Media Composer 5-style shortcuts are aimed to make a switch to Premiere Pro even easier. The new version also offers gestural control on Macs, including pinch controls and two-finger scrolling.

Wixted also notes that Adobe made an effort to offer maximum workflow flexibility, with new native support for ARRI Alexa, RED SCARLET-X, RED EPIC, and Canon Cinema EOS C300 camera footage. "The idea that you have to transcode is not true," she says. "If you want to transcode, go ahead. But you don't have to."

Expanded multicam support now allows editors to work with as many cameras as were on the shoot. (The previous limit was four cameras.) Also, the process of creating a multi-camera sequence has been simplified, says Wixted.

Other changes include a default to the new "two-up" workspace when Adobe Premiere Pro is launched. With this new look, both the Source Monitor and Program Monitor panels are more uncluttered and customizable, and media is easier to view, sort, and arrange by viewing resizable 16:9 thumbnails of clips directly in the Project panel. Also new are clip markers, Encore chapter markers, web links, and Flash cue points in the Source Monitor, Program Monitor, or Timeline panel displayed in color to make them easier to spot.



Dynamic trimming has been redesigned. Click image for larger view.


There are now several options for quickly selecting and shifting edit points, including dynamic trimming via standard J-K-L keyboard shortcuts. "Redesign of dynamic trimming is a big change," says Wixted. "It's a complete overhaul of how you work with Premiere now." It's also easier to create VFX: editors can now create adjustment layers similar to those in After Effects and Photoshop, apply effects once to the adjustment layer and see those effects automatically modify all the underlying tracks. The Audio Mixer has a new look and functionality, from the multi-channel mixer found in Adobe Audition.

For editors who work with the footage from small-format cameras, Warp Stabilizer -- first introduced in Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and now available in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 -- offers the tools to stabilize shaky handheld footage and remove motion artifacts.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 offers an enticing package

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 also offers new options for control over color, including the redesigned Three-Way Color Corrector effect. The Premiere Pro editor can also utilize Adobe SpeedGrade CS6 software. "With SpeedGrade now part of Adobe, we have people deeply knowledgeable about color science," says Wixted.

"It's also easier than ever to create deliverables for multiple platforms," she adds. Adobe Media Encoder CS6 offers a new Preset Browser that makes outputting to multiple formats faster. Newly added presets support a variety of Android devices as well as more than 20 Apple devices and output to YouTube, Vimeo and PAL.

Adobe has gone all out with Creative Suite 6 -- and particularly Premiere Pro -- to provide an enticing package for new and experienced editors. By listening to what editors want and creating features they need, Adobe took a crucial step to reassure editors that their best interests are central. The constantly crowded booth is plenty of evidence that editors' interest is piqued. After a long slog, Adobe Premiere Pro may be at the tipping point to more widespread acceptance.

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Other members of the COW family were also wowed by Adobe's new Premiere Pro CS6 and other new features of Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium.

Here's what Walter Soyka had to say regarding a private demonstration of Adobe's Collaborative Workflow Concept: "This was an incredibly cool preview. Chris Harlan has been talking about the thin client a lot, and this was a great example. As Kevin said, all the footage was being streamed to the local editor from the remote machine with playback quality being scaled to available bandwidth, and with full quality reference stills when playback was stopped. Also interesting was the fact that effects were rendered in real-time on the server side, and the result streamed back to the local client.

What was even more remarkable was that the local machine was on the show floor in Las Vegas, and the remote machine was back in San Jose somewhere. This would be a powerful technology on a local network, but the fact that they were able to show it working over the Internet was all the more enticing.

Some contributors to this forum seem to have taken the stance that Apple is the only true innovator in the NLE space, and I hope that a discussion like this can change their minds. Adobe looks to be at the early stages of a very serious play at unifying geographically distributed teams, and that may well prove to be (imagine me putting a dollar in the virtual swear jar as I say this) a game-changer."