Random notes from my first “real world” Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 edit

the Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

The new Premiere continues to impress.

I was fortunate to get my hands on an early release of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and an edit that came up last week seemed like the perfect place to test it out. It wasn’t an overly complex edit, a 3 minute piece shot on RED with interviews and b-roll. I cut the offline and it will then go to an After Effects artist for some fancy graphics and Baselight for color grading. As I was taking notes on the new version of Premiere Pro for an upcoming review I thought it might be interesting to just publish those notes in a blog post about Premiere Pro CS6. Here they are.

As most people know by now Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 is a major upgrade to Adobe’s NLE. It really seems like Adobe has stepped up their game in the wake of Final Cut Pro X as Adobe has taken the time to rethink much of Premiere Pro. A new interface, better stability and a big advance in trimming are all part of this release. While I wrote about my top 5 Premiere Pro CS6 features a couple of weeks ago there’s a lot more to Premiere Pro CS6 than just the new features. Some of the notes below refer to features and issues that have been in PPro long before CS6 but they are things I still make note of when working in professional, real-world, client-in-the-room edit sessions as opposed to working on my own.

Is this new version of Premiere Pro perfect? Ummmm no (is any NLE perfect?) but it is greatly improved and really has been a joy to work with. Here’s the notes:

• Prelude was a great way to log and apply range-based extended markers to clips. I was able to mark up a single clip and send that to PPro and it would update the existing clip while PPro was running but it also placed a new version of the same clip in the project which I then had to delete. Prelude is going to be a nice addition to the suite of applications. I too hope Adobe can offer Prelude as a stand-alone, purchase-alone application to give to producers and directors. read more...