NAB 2012: Day 2 Recap - Las Vegas Supermeet: Adobe CS6, Smoke, Blackmagic, Shane Hurlbut, Morgan Spurlock

nofilmschool by Joe Marine

No video updates at the moment, as my entire night was spent at the Eleventh Annual Las Vegas Supermeet, a meeting of the Creative Pro User Group Network, which is a gathering of editors and like-minded post people. Unfortunately the event was plagued by projection and sound problems (the in-house staff are the only people who can touch that stuff). It’s ironic that this happened to a room full of nerds who understand the issues and could have fixed it pretty easily! Regardless we got to see a bit of Adobe CS6, the new Smoke, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, Shane Hurlbut talked about the Canon 1DC, and we got a wonderfully hilarious talk from Morgan Spurlock, who went into detail about his career.

I can say immediately that I like the look of Adobe CS6 much better than the older versions. They’ve done a lot to try to make editing easier and simpler, and try to get the interface to get out of your way. Here are some of the new features that were shown off:

• Hover Scrub: Allows you to skim through a clip by hovering over the picture and moving the mouse
• Adjustment Layers: Exactly what it sounds like – these are added just like they are in Photoshop.
• Button Editor: Change the buttons on the playback windows – or get rid of them altogether
• Dynamic Trimming: Trim clips while the timeline is playing or looping – it doesn’t stop even if you change something
• Multicam: Allows an unlimited number of angles
• Supports 5K RAW (RED) and ArriRAW
• Open CL support for AMD GPUs

The Dynamic Trimming mode is absolutely fantastic. The ability to keep playback going indefinitely while you are trimming and changing in/out points is such a faster way to edit. I am also a big fan of adjustment layers, where adjustments are non-destructively added on top of the clips. It makes sense that Adobe is trying to incorporate the better parts of Photoshop into CS6. If a program like Photoshop is that widespread, there’s no reason not to want to emulate certain areas. read more...