Adobe brings Creative Suite 6 to NAB
By Randi Altman & Marc Loftus
April 16, 2012

Adobe brings Creative Suite 6 to NAB

LAS VEGAS — Adobe is at NAB with the newest iteration of its Creative Suite – CS6 Production Premium – offering enhancements to all the tools in the package, including After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition, as well as new additions Prelude (for ingest, logging and transcoding) and SpeedGrade (color grading).

Premiere Pro CS6 features a new user interface (the 5.5 UI is still available if wanted) and editing experience improvements, including new icons and background color.  Product manager Al Mooney, says, “There is more media and less clutter.”

The Project Panel and Media Browser panels offer new features and a simplified look, allowing for zooming in on thumbnails, which are now 16x9, as well as the ability to skim through them. There is also the ability to mark clips inside the Project Panel.  It’s also easier to see where a clip is used thanks to an icon in lower right corner. Full screen playback is available as well. There is now also limited OpenCL support.

Mercury Transmit allows third-party IO manufacturers to integrate more closely – Mooney, describes it as a “socket, and third parties just need to plug into it.” Adjustment Layers offer a transparent layer on top of other video layers to which you can apply effects, and Warp Stabilizer is now built in and GPU accelerated; there’s also a new Rolling Shutter Repair effect. Audio meters are scalable, and there is a new mixing UI.

AFTER EFFECTS
Adobe is calling After Effects CS6 the biggest release of the software in 10 years. Inside is Global Performance Cache, so users don’t have to render unless they have to. They also re-designed how the GPU is used. “It feels faster to use,” says product manager Steve Forde.

There is now a camera-tracking tool that will get users 90 percent of the way there. There are occluded effects and masking improvements with feathering. After Effects is also now offering full 3D text and vector shapes.



SPEEDGRADE
While Adobe only purchased Iridas SpeedGrade back in September, the color grading tool is already a big part of Creative Suite 6. With this new release, users can export from Premiere to Speedgrade. It can also take in other EDLs, there is scene change detection and a large number of filters, and the Opacity slider – impact slider – can tone down decisions on any layer.

AUDITION
Adobe has also refined the Audition experience, making it faster to use. There is a new Media Browser, a new quick search panel and support for grouping clips. Users now have the ability to stretch clips in realtime, and to specify whether stretched clips are monophonic, polyphonic or varispeed, and they added new manual and automatic pitch controls, as well as new tools for visualizing how pitch appears. And you can now have open as many sessions as you want.

Audition now supports Mackie and Eucon protocols for control surface support, and there are ADR tools that allow for auto speech alignment. New effects include the Notch Filter, Graphic Phase Shifter and Doppler shift.  And CD burning has been brought back.

PRELUDE
Adobe Prelude is a solution for managing file-based media. Starting with flexible ingest tools — users can create a backup copy on ingest, as well as transcode or not, as your workflow dictates. Prelude offers a fast, keyboard-driven environment for creating sub-clips and adding comments to media. Rough cuts are easy to assemble, and can be handed off to Premiere Pro for refinement.

Look for upcoming reviews of these products in Post.