Three Adobe CS 6 Features to be Excited About

Videomaker by Makie Wilhelm

On May 7th Adobe released Creative Suite 6, and it’s pretty clear that their eyes are keenly focused on video production. While we’re still in the process of writing our review of the software suite, here are a few of the features we’re think video producers everywhere will be excited about.

Adjustment Layers in Premiere – Here’s the situation. You’ve edited together a very complex sequence of shots which features a drunk stumbling from home from a night at the local watering hole. The sequence is composed of several point of view shots cut tightly together, and sprinkled with wide shots of the person walking down the sidewalk. You want to make sure every POV shot is blurry and de-saturated so the viewer can see the world as the drunk sees it. Before, our only solution was to either apply the blur and de-saturation effects to each clip individually, or nest each chunk of shots and then apply the effects. Adjustment layers change this. They work just like they do in After Effects. Simply place an adjustment layer over the shots you want to affect, then apply the effects you want to the adjustment layer. It will transfer those effects to every clip underneath it in Premiere’s timeline. Now, if you have to change the amount of blur or desaturation, you only have to change the settings on the adjustment layer(s) and not each clip or clips inside of a nested sequence. To me, this feature is about six versions late, but better late than never!

3D Text (and Basic Shapes) in After Effects – Have you ever needed to do simple 3D text when working in an After Effects project? Unfortunately, After Effects could never do true 3D. Rather, it could place 2D objects in 3D space. That means if you wanted 3D text, you’d have to put 2D text in a 3D composition, duplicate it about a hundred times, then offset each layer’s Z position by one pixel. What a pain! read more...