Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Review

Cameratown by Ron Risman

I first installed the 30-day trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 as well as the entire Creative Production Suite CS6, on my older Dell Inspiron 530 with Quad Core processor and just 4GB of memory. I was in the process of upgrading to a new system, but what the heck, why not test the software with the bare minimum requirements. I first installed the 30-day trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 as well as the entire Creative Production Suite CS6, on my older Dell Inspiron 530 with Quad Core processor and just 4GB of memory. I was in the process of upgrading to a new system, but what the heck, why not test the software with the bare minimum requirements.

Adobe software is typically bulky, meaning that they don't usually play nice at the minimum requirements, so you can imagine my surprise when my first test project using Premiere Pro CS6 was going surprisingly well. H.264 Video footage played very smooth on the timeline - even using the new full screen option - and I was able to actually scrub in real-time while using the medium resolution setting on the program monitor.

While this was promising, I knew that project I had created was fairly basic with just two video tracks and two audio tracks. The two video tracks contained the same footage, but but I applied a blur to the bottom track (Track 1) in order to use it as a backdrop to the track above it (Track 2). The audio tracks consisted of one music track and one vocal track that I recorded using a Tascam DR-05 portable audio recorder.

My aging computer is a 3.5 year old Dell Inspiron 530 with Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU running at 2.40GHz with just 4GB Memory, an NVIDIA GT240 graphics card with 1GB video memory and Windows 7 Professional OS (64-bit). While this system does work with Premiere Pro CS6, it is not in any way a recommended or preferred configuration. While the processor is plenty fast enough, the 4GB memory is considered a minimum requirement to run Premiere Pro... Adobe recommends 8GB. The nVIDIA GT240 graphics card is not officially supported by Adobe, which means that Premiere Pro won't access the CUDA graphics engine to enhance performance. I did manually add the GT240 to the CUDA supported text file in order to get Premiere Pro to recognize the card as "supported," the card is on the very low end of the scale when it comes to performance. While that tweak got me by in CS5.5 the system was surely showing its age with regard to RAM and video performance. Since the system doesn't have the space for a faster graphics card or extra memory I decided to custom build a computer designed to handle HD video editing. read more...

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	Adobe CS6 Production Premium (LIC, ESD) $1,799.00			Adobe CS6 Production Premium Upgrade from CS5.5 Collection (LIC, ESD) $359.00			Adobe CS6 Production Premium Upgrade from CS5 (LIC, ESD) $699.00