Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 review

While Adobe Photoshop lives a charmed life as the de facto image editor for professionals, its video-editing cousin has had a more difficult upbringing. A decade ago it was the leader for desktop video production, but recently it started to look clunky and unresponsive in the face of younger, sprightlier competition from Apple and Sony.

Premiere Pro CS5 was a dramatic comeback, with a shift to 64-bit code and a new playback engine that transformed preview performance with the help of CUDA graphics acceleration. Combined with its superb effects, sophisticated keyframe automation and tight integration with other CS applications, Adobe was onto a winner. Apple’s controversial release of Final Cut Pro X, which in some respects was a downgrade from the previous version, further bolstered Premiere Pro’s standing among professional users.

For our own video productions at PC Pro, we made the switch from Sony Vegas Pro to Premiere Pro CS5, but it was only a brief fling. There was no doubt Premiere Pro gave better preview performance, and its nested timelines and Bézier curve animation let us do things that were impossible in Vegas Pro. However, for simple, everyday tasks – truncating and ordering clips, applying simple dissolve transitions – Vegas Pro felt more fluid.

The same thought seems to have resonated with Adobe, as Premiere Pro CS6 introduces a massive interface overhaul. Visually, the thrust is towards reducing the amount of space given over to controls, and freeing up more room for the media being edited. The default workspace now shows large source and program monitors across the top, with the timeline and a tabbed panel for everything else at the bottom. The toolbox has been moved next to the timeline, and the audio meter now fills the available space to the right. It fits comfortably on a 1,920 x 1,080 display.

It was possible to change CS5 to a similar layout, but the crop of buttons below each monitor ate heavily into the space for viewing media. For CS6, these buttons have been rationalised into a smaller set that occupy a single row, and they’re easily customised for those who want to restore the missing functions, or hidden for those who know the keyboard shortcuts. There’s a new Play Around button for looping around the marker, a function previously hidden away as an Alt-click option. The jog and shuttle controls have disappeared – we won’t miss them, but others might.

The Project panel, home to all project media, is much more powerful than before. Thumbnails are scalable and icons show when a clip has been used in the timeline. Simply moving the mouse across a thumbnail scrubs through the clip and clicking reveals a playback bar, complete with in and out points. These can be adjusted with the mouse or keyboard shortcuts, arguably rendering the source monitor redundant. This works for native After Effects project files, too – a big improvement on CS5.

On the timeline, the improvements continue: double-clicking the edge of a clip launches a split-screen view for adjusting the timing of a cut using keyboard shortcuts, or applying dissolve transitions. It isn’t quite as effortless as Vegas Pro’s ability to add a transition simply by overlapping clips, but it’s pretty close, and there are lots of other smart time-savers for adjusting the in and out points of one or more clips.

For us, though, the biggest single improvement is that playback can continue while edits are being made. In CS5, any attempt to edit caused playback to stop – a major nuisance, and a stark contrast to Vegas Pro, which can even switch the project framerate without missing a beat. This version isn’t quite that determinedly unstoppable, though.

Adjustment layers will be a familiar concept to Photoshop and After Effects users, allowing effects to be applied to all the tracks sat below them on the timeline – and they’re now introduced to Premiere Pro. These are extremely useful, not only for applying effects to a stack of layered clips, but also to sequences of clips on the same track. Adjustment layers worked flawlessly for colour, distortion and temporal effects, and exactly as expected when combined with nested sequences.

There are lots of smaller interface improvements, too. Preview resolution now gets a dedicated button; double-clicking an effect applies it to the selected clip; media can be dragged from Windows directly onto the timeline instead of only via the Project panel. And it’s now possible to zoom in and out of the timeline using handles on the edges of the scrollbar, which feels more natural than the separate zoom control.

Holding down the Alt key and spinning the mouse wheel still zooms the timeline in and out, but oddly the orientation has been reversed. Otherwise, though, there’s a sensible balance between improved usability and maintaining the status quo. Adobe hasn’t got carried away and stripped out important controls for the sake of visual tidiness.

Smooth operator

There are two new effects. Warp Stabilizer first appeared in After Effects CS5.5 and is equally welcome here. Analysis of clips is slow but it happens in the background, and the results are incredibly smooth. It’s far more controllable than Vegas Pro’s Stabilize effect, but default settings were overzealous in their determination to smooth out more violent shakes, leaving us with some work to do to avoid an excessively cropped frame or black bars appearing around the sides. It incorporates rolling shutter correction to remove the skewed appearance of fast-moving scenes captured with CMOS sensors – a common problem for DSLR and CSC footage. This is also available on its own as the Rolling Shutter Repair effect.

The three-way colour corrector effect has a flurry of enhancements, including better control over the cut-off and overlap between the highlights, mid-tones and shadows, plus individual reset buttons for each band. Multi-camera editing is quicker to set up and no longer limited to four cameras. With the help of the Mercury Playback Engine’s superb preview performance, it delivered seven simultaneous AVCHD streams on our Core i7 PC without CUDA acceleration.

The CUDA acceleration remains limited to a small number of graphics cards, mostly from the upmarket Nvidia Quadro range. It isn’t unreasonable to expect Premiere Pro users to choose a graphics card to complement their editor rather than the other way around. This isn’t so easy for laptop users, though, so Adobe has extended GPU acceleration to Radeon HD 6750M and HD 6770M cards with 1GB of RAM via OpenCL. It’s no coincidence that these are the graphics chips used in recent higher-end MacBook Pros. Those running other Mac and Windows laptops shouldn’t get their hopes up, though. Premiere Pro’s product manager cited the testing involved in certifying other hardware as a hindrance to wider support for GPU acceleration.

Other engine-room improvements include native support for the latest ARRI, Canon Cinema EOS and RED cameras, plus improved support for XML, AAF and OMF interchange formats for moving projects to and from Final Cut Pro 7 or Avid. Meanwhile, Adobe Mercury Transmit is the fancy name given to more efficient communication with hardware monitor systems from the likes of AJA and Black Magic.

After Effects CS6

All these changes add up to a vast improvement to the overall experience of using Premiere Pro. Clunky and unresponsive now seem like entirely inappropriate words; efficient and focused are more apt. Existing users may feel a little short-changed by the lack of new creative tools, but this is an area where Premiere Pro already excels. CS5 and CS6 are two phases of a significant overhaul, and they leave us struggling to find anything to criticise.

It looks even better when considered as part of the CS6 Production Premium suite. This comprises a distinguished line-up of applications, including Photoshop Extended, Illustrator and Flash Professional. It also includes the audio editor SoundBooth, plus After Effects, Adobe’s phenomenally powerful video effects and compositing software.

Since After Effects typically deals with short, extremely complex sequences, it renders each frame and buffers it to RAM in order to achieve glitch-free playback. Global Performance Cache, new to CS6, aims at streamlining the process. It’s described by Adobe as a combination of improved RAM cache handling, a persistent disk cache and better graphics card acceleration. Two key benefits are that previously cached sections are saved to disk for later recall, so switching between different sequences or undoing an edit doesn’t now require a re-render. Cached previews also take an intelligent approach to layers, so adjusting one element doesn’t necessarily require a re-render of the entire frame.

The results were a little unpredictable in the short time we’ve had to use the software. Sometimes the improvement was dramatic: adding an additional layer to a complex composited scene, a smooth preview appeared extremely quickly, which suggests the software was reusing previously rendered frames and simply adding the additional layer on top. At other times it wasn’t nearly as quick, and simpler challenges such as toggling a layer off and on required re-rendering. It’s an excellent idea, and we wouldn’t like to guess how tricky it’s been to implement, but our instinct is that there’s still room for improvement.

Other enhancements include the ability to convert Illustrator files into editable vector drawings. Again, it isn’t the most robust process: outlines and fills became separated, and a gradient fill proved too much for it. There’s a 3D extrude function and a ray tracer 3D rendering engine: basic stuff compared to dedicated 3D software, but enough to produce some respectable 3D animated logos. And there’s also a new 3D Camera Tracker to help make 3D elements fit with the implied 3D space of 2D footage.

Our favourite new feature could easily be overlooked: a variable feather can be applied at different points around a mask. It can be painstaking work but allows for extremely accurate masking when grappling with motion blur, where fast-moving elements need to be feathered more than slower elements.

Sadly, After Effects doesn’t share Premiere Pro’s improved Project panel, nor its new-found ability to adjust settings without interrupting playback; click absolutely anything and playback grinds to a halt. Regardless, this is still an outstanding application, and for us, possibly the most rewarding of the entire CS range.

Elsewhere, the introduction of SpeedGrade as part of the Production Premium bundle (previously published by Iridas) is very welcome. We won’t attempt to second-guess what professional colour graders look for, but this is the most sophisticated colour-grading software we’ve used. The lack of native support for Premiere Pro project files is disappointing, but Iridas only joined the Adobe fold in September 2011. Regardless, it’s a valuable addition to the suite that further bolsters its position for professional use.

Pricing is yet to be announced, but unless Adobe goes berserk with its strategy, both Premiere Pro and CS6 Production Premium should easily justify the required investment. Once again, the new features have exceeded our expectations and, once again we’re extremely tempted to switch to Premiere Pro as our main editor. This time, we suspect, it will be a longer-lasting affair.

Details
Software subcategory	Video editing software
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	no
Operating system Windows XP supported?	no
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	yes