Review: Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Studio Daily by Scott Simmons

Everyone has been talking about Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 recently. It was a hot topic at NAB 2012, certainly, and Adobe’s booth was full of people taking in demos and asking questions. The entire Adobe Creative Suite has also had impressive upgrades, which will be good news to Adobe fans that are getting used to using a number of Adobe applications that complement and interact with each other.

People are still talking about Premiere Pro CS6, which I'll focus on for this review. This new version is a very nice upgrade that makes some significant improvements over the last version in several key areas.

What Hasn’t Changed (All That Much)

Native Camera Support and Mercury Playback

Two of the biggest selling points to Premiere Pro have been its native camera support (and its ability to handle many of those different camera formats) and the Mercury Playback Engine. Native file support is still very strong in version 6 and the Mercury Engine has been retooled to work with some other non-NVIDIA CUDA video cards. As you may recall, Mercury originally only harnessed the power of NVIDIA’s CUDA technology to offer up some unprecedented realtime playback.

Dynamic Linking

Dynamic Linking is Adobe’s way of easily interchanging media and materials between different applications in the Adobe suite. Select some clips in a Premiere Pro CS6 timeline, Dynamic Link them to After Effects and you have a new clip in the PPro timeline that updates as the AE project is tweaked. If you need to get your PPro sequence to DVD, then just import that sequence right into Adobe Encore. Tight integration is also a huge selling point for the Production Premium, which includes After Effects, Photoshop Extended, Audition, SpeedGrade and much more. read more...