Adobe Announces Production Premium CS6 at DVinfo.net

Pete Bauer · April 11th, 2012, 10:20 PM

Adobe is taking the wraps off of Production Premium CS6 just in time for NAB. There is too much to fit into one post, but since I’ve gotten an opportunity to take a peek at this upcoming release, I wanted to give you at least a quick look at some of the features that I’m most excited about.

CS6 Production Premium will include the following applications:
• Adobe Encore CS6
• Adobe Media Encoder CS6
• Adobe Story Plus
• After Effects CS6
• Audition CS6
• Photoshop CS6 **public beta announced March 21
• Prelude CS6
• Premiere Pro CS6
• Speedgrade CS6

New to the suite are Adobe Prelude, an ingest and rough cut application and Adobe Speedgrade, an amazingly powerful color correction application. OnLocation doesn’t seem to have made it into Creative Suite this time around.

Throughout the Suite, the default interface is sleeker and uses a darker background and brighter colors to help put your eye where you want it. Dynamic Link works in the same way as in previous versions, but has been recoded to work much faster, allowing smoother workflows than ever.

Here are just some of the major features you’ll see in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6:
• An optimized Mercury Playback Engine that is faster than before in software-only mode, and also sports a broader range of choices in graphics cards. There’s even OpenCL support for certain MacBook Pro (TM) machines using OS X 10.7 that have AMD Radeon HD6750M or HD 6770M graphics cards with over 1GB of VRAM.
• Adobe Mercury Transmit gives Adobe I/O hardware partners, such as AJA, Black Magic Design, Bluefish444, Matrox, and MOTU direct access to the Mercury Playback Engine, so you experience better playback performance than ever before. When using external monitors, you’ll get full-screen playback while maintaining all the real-time performance benefits of the Mercury Playback Engine.
• The addition of Warp Stabilizer and Rolling Shutter Repair, which were previously only in Adobe After Effects.
• Unlimited cameras in Multicam.
• Many new and enhanced editing tools such as adjustment layers very reminiscent of After Effects, trimming directly in the Program Monitor, and a redesigned Audio Mixer. You can now double click to apply effects to selected clips.
• A redesigned Three-Way Color Corrector effect, that of course, uses GPU acceleration
• The redesigned Adobe Media Encoder is now fully 64 bit software with a much expanded preset list and more efficient batch encoding that makes multiscreen delivery a breeze.

More to follow!

Justin Molush · April 11th, 2012, 10:23 PM

Well, put me down, Im upgrading.

John Wiley · April 11th, 2012, 10:38 PM

Wow, looks great!

I wonder if purchasing CS5.5 Production Premium now and getting the free CS6 upgrade deal will allow you to download the new programs in the suite, Prelude and Speedgrade?

Reading the terms and conditions on the Adobe website the official wording was something along the lines of "get a free uprade to the equivelant CS6 version of the programs." So, what if there is no CS5.5 equivelant to upgrade from? Does that mean that taking advantage of this offer means you'll miss out on the new components in this suite?

I've got a new workstation arriving this week and I'm itching to place an order for CS5.5 to take full advantage of the 16GB RAM and GPU acceleration (currently I'm on CS3). This announcement makes me even more excited!

Pete Bauer · April 11th, 2012, 10:58 PM

I should have mentioned in the first post that actual availability date and pricing are not yet available.

A few highlight about After Effects CS6 before I turn in for the night:

• Native support for Adobe SpeedGrade .Look files, cineSpace .csp files, and overrange IRIDAS .cube files.
• Not only is Mocha still there, but you can launch it directly from within After Effects.
• Global RAM cache. This is a vastly improved frame caching system that allows you to try different options and Undo without a penalty in productivity, as well as render and cache a comp’s work area in the background.
• Persistent Disk Cache. Previews done in a previous session are saved and immediately available the next time you open a project.
• New graphics pipeline. With more efficient use of OpenGL, the work environment in After Effects is more highly responsive and smoother. You’ll get faster manipulation of layers with graphical overlays such as masks, motion tracker points, and motion paths. Depending on the hardware, functions may be speeded by anywhere from 1.5 to 16 times!
• A new intelligent 3D Camera Tracker effect.
• A new ray-traced 3D rending engine giving you the capability to quickly design fully ray-traced geometric text and shape layers in 3D space. Pair this engine with, say an nVidia Quadro 2000, and you’ll see over 10 times the performance over CPU-only rendering by a stock Intel i7 3960X processor!
• Variable mask feather lets you set any number of points along a closed maks and define the width of the feather on a per-point basis
• Pro Import, previously available as a separate product from Automatic Duck, is now included with After Effects CS6.
• Many, many effects that were previously 8bpc now support 16bpc or 32 bit float including all of the HD plug-ins of the included CycoreFX HD Suite.

John Wiley · April 11th, 2012, 11:21 PM

The new AE 3D tracker and Ray-traced 3D engine look like great additions. This will make it much easier to integrate 3D text into a composition, even with camera movement, without the need for plug ins.

Another big plus for me is the variable feathering on masks. This will greatly simplify the masking process, making it easier to use a single mask for a particular object.

I'm very excited about the addition of Warp Stabiliser to Premiere. This will halve the amount of time that I spend in AE for most projects, as stabilising footage is currently the main thing I use Premiere/AE dynamic link for when editing weddings.

The new Prelude program looks useful, particularly if it plays nicely with Cineform. If I am understanding right, it means that I can now import my footage, select only the useful parts of each clip to convert (ie cut out the stuff where the camera is pointing at the floor, or get rid of excessive handles), and then let it transcode in the background. This will not only be a huge time saver, but a space saver as well as it will only transcode the useful parts of each clip, rather than wasting HDD space transcoding an entire 2-minute clip when you only need 3 seconds of it.

Speedgrade looks like a huge value add-on, and for many people might eliminate the need to use any 3rd party grading tools such as Magic Bullet or even Firstlight. Also, I hope that Premiere's new 3-way colour corrector is similar to the one in FCP. this will make 95% of my CC so much easier and faster. I hate Premiere's current 3-way CC and avoid it like the plague.

Exciting times for sure! Now, where did I put my credit card?

Kevin Currie · April 12th, 2012, 12:17 AM

I thought I would hold off on this and maybe just wait for CS7 if I'm still in the game by then. But these new features, particularly those in Premiere, have made me rethink my plans. I guess it will all depend on the pricing. I'll miss OnLocation though.

Daniel Browning · April 12th, 2012, 12:47 AM

Will they add support for superwhites? Or does it still clip whites at 235?

Roger Averdahl · April 12th, 2012, 01:49 AM

Interesting blogs:
- Premiere Pro CS6: what’s new and changed
- After Effects CS6: what’s new and changed
- What’s New in Adobe Audition CS6

Bart Walczak · April 12th, 2012, 05:53 AM

Looks like an awesome update with the exception of Speedgrade integration, which is kind of underwhelming. I mean - export to DPX to grade? Resolve can do better than that. I guess we'll have to wait for 7 for the better stuff in Speedgrade.

Anyway, I have been watching Lynda.com's trainings with the new features for past few hours.

I'm curious though about a few issues that are not mentioned there (so far), so if there is anyone here in the know and can talk, please let me know:

1. The uninterrupted playback feature rocks. Does it extend to live scopes in reference monitor as well?

2. Is the performance with AVCHD scrubbing improved in any way?

3. I guess no smart rendering - Premiere still forgets what it rendered if you stopped it and only part of the clip was rendered?

4. You can change monitoring, which is great. Can you change the sequence settings?

5. Can you copy audio mixer settings between sequences?

6. Is the HD to DV/MPEG-2 for interlaced footage bug fixed?

Even if all the answers are no, we will most likely be upgrading, but I'm curious if these were addressed in any way.

John Wiley · April 12th, 2012, 06:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kevin Currie

I thought I would hold off on this and maybe just wait for CS7 if I'm still in the game by then. But these new features, particularly those in Premiere, have made me rethink my plans. I guess it will all depend on the pricing. I'll miss OnLocation though.

And there it is... the first mention of CS7 haha!

I agree though that so far on paper this is the first refresh that makes me really feel like I need it.

Pete Bauer · April 12th, 2012, 10:54 AM

A bit on Adobe Audition CS6

It’s kid in the candy store time. Adobe Audition CS6 is so loaded with new capabilities and ease-of-use enhancements that I’m not sure where to start. So in somewhat random order, here are some of the big ones:

• Clip Stretching is as easy as click and drag. In real time. Simple as that!
• The new Automatic Speech Alignment Tool not only examines transients and waveforms, but does frequency and spectral analyses to improve the accuracy and speed overdubbing.
• Both a real time, configurable Automatic Pitch Correction feature and really feature rich Manual Pitch Correction will be essential tools for voice overs, vocal music, and so much more. A really cool new Spectral Pitch Display is immediately going to become as invaluable as the Spectral Frequency Display has been over the years.
• Envelop keyframe editing gives you essentially unlimited control over multiple envelops on any combination of track effects. Each envelop is displayed in a different color in the automation lane below the track’s waveform. (Personal comment: WAY awesome!).
• The Multiple Clipboards feature of Adobe Audition CS6 keeps up to five clips in memory for quick use and re-use.
• Industry standard controller devices like EUCON, Mackie, and the Avid Artist series are fully supported. Just tell Adobe Audition CS6 which controller you have hooked up and you’re off to the races. Setup is simple: a single dialog box in the Preferences menu.
• Workflow features include not only grouping, but being able to suspend a group temporarily to work on a single clip. The hidden beauty: the group still exists so it takes just a single step for the whole grouping to be in effect again. No more recreating groups if you need to make a change to one clip! Groups will automatically change to a different color, but you can easily give each group your choice of custom color for easy visualization.
• Have you ever spent too much time repetitively trying to get a seamless delete of a segment of audio? Yeah, probably a million times. Finally, it’ll be a quick and easy task. Clicking the Skip Selection icon will (by default) play from three seconds prior until to three seconds after a selection – but skip the selection. Drag the selection boundaries as you please while Audition loops the segment. When you’re happy, just delete the selection and you're done. The pre- and post-roll times are adjustable, of course.
• Conversely , the Trim to Time Selection command in multitrack will trim all portions of a clip or group before and after a selection. This is the multitrack equivalent of the Waveform Editor's Crop command.

Some other additions I’ll simply list: As with Premiere Pro, marker management is now much more robust; we have Metronome; Generate Tones effect; new channelization capabilities that give you additional signal routing capabilities like side-chaining and up-mixing stereo to surround formats; and Red Book music CD burning.

This version of Adobe Audition CS6 is genuinely a giant leap forward.

Roger Averdahl · April 12th, 2012, 11:07 AM