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CS6 is not an improvement
I’m not one to make flippant comments about version upgrades, and I typically love Adobe and have used Premiere professionally for the last 8 years.
However, I must say that CS6 has been a fairly big disappointment. Coming from CS5.0, I have yet to find any noticeable improvements, and find the changes made to be pretty frustrating. Even three maintenance versions in, Premiere crashes multiple times a day. Even “X.0” abominations like MacOS 10.5, Digital Performer 6, and Windows Vista got things sorted out better by 3 updates in.
Some of the problems are bugs, but also some of the intentional changes are unfortunate. Off the bat, the new color scheme (which is, thankfully, modifiable, though difficult) is GARISH. I mean, the 80s were kinda fun in retrospect, but Hot Pink and Neon Green are not easy on the eyes after hours of trying to color correct pristine video. Thankfully, I found out how to go in and change the hex codes for the labels (the label preference doesn’t allow you to copy colors), so I was able to copy over the label colors from CS5. Here they are if anyone is interested:
Blue A1B3C0
Cyan 9AC1BB
Green A8BDA5
Violet 9B9AC1
Pink EAA6A6
Gray C2CDCD
Lilac C29BBB
Orange DBC181Besides that, they made the bizarre decision to make the magnetic cursor regions bigger, and the contextual cursors HUGE. The two of those things put together make it very difficult to make finite timeline changes on the fly without zooming way in. I think they had it just right in CS5, but now I can’t actually select shortish transitions unless I zoom way in first, which is aggravating.
But furthermore, I’ve hoped that one day, Adobe would fix some ongoing issues that have been around since CS3, Premiere1.5, or before. You can still only have one audio VST window open at a time (or can you… there doesn’t seem to be any consistency there). Premiere is the only VST/AU host that has this problem. It’s simply a bug, there’s no reason for it, it’s obvious, it’s annoying, and it’s still here 5 versions later. Also, every version I wait for them to take the small amount of time it would take to fix the Titler window and all of its “resize creep” problems. Still there, been there since CS3 (maybe 2.0, I skipped 2.0).
The only improvement (though it takes some getting used to, and it even has it’s downside), is that they’ve combined the scroll bar and zoom bar into one item, which is understandable from a space-saving point of view. However, the downside is that it was nice to have two different scroll widgets on the top and bottom of the timeline. I (as many people do) keep my timeline at the bottom part of the window, so having a scroll bar above the pane was handy. Also, they’ve gotten rid of the “mountain zoom” widget, which, while I hardly ever used, was nice once in a while. But, the merge does save on screen real estate a bit, which is always welcome (even with two 23″ monitors).
After Effects, thankfully, has kept its UI free of poor changes. I only wish that someday they adopt the Premiere/Photoshop History window, could be even more powerful in AE than it is in Premiere. Besides that and continuing to use the original export engine, which is older and clunkier than AME, After Effects has been okay. Except for one huge bug, which they are aware of and fixing right now (they have yet to correct the MainConcept XDCAM bug that was fixed in Premiere in the last update). But the RayTracing engine is a dream come true… I just wish the Premiere team could deliver an improvement to us on that scale.
Sorry for the rant, I’ve just crashed too many times today, and needed to vent a little. Take care.
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com -
6 Replies
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Hi Eric,
I agree that Premiere still has (diplomatically speaking) plenty of room for improvement.
I’m pretty new to Premiere, starting with CS5.5, but but there are features in CS6 that I like enough that I couldn’t go back: uninterrupted playback (playback doesn’t stop while you adjust effects parameters), adjustment layers, trimming, and Warp Stabilizer are among my favorites.
I don’t think your post is a rant like you said — I think it’s actually some well-written and very valid criticism, especially of the mouse cursor targets which affect so many user interactions. I’d encourage you to write these up as a series of bug reports/feature requests. This is the best way to get a complaint in front of the development team, because they are logged and tracked, and extra consideration seems to be given to the most-reported bugs / most-requested features.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I’ll agree that CS6 is far from perfect. I’m honestly surprised the folks at Adobe keep answering the phone when I call….. 🙂
But in terms of reliability, playback performance and rendering performance, CS6 was a huge jump forward in our minds. Our biggest gripes with CS6 are the Track Based Audio Mixer and projects that go corrupted for no apparent reason. Also AJA cards cannot output to tape yet, but thankfully the BlackMagic card will. And we need to make sure the entire interface is on one screen for output or we’ll drop frames.
I just posted a blog with our workflow for episodics, documentaries and news stories in our shop. We’ve been running CS6 since it came out in April and have been quite happy with it. Quirky yes, non-improvement, not in our case.
Maybe you’ll find something in our workflow that will help your issues?
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/workflow-update-imac-adobe-the-x-factor
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Hey Walter…
you probably know this…and based on your comments…the nuance you are looking for is the mixer itself…
but audio automation can be added at the clip level via rubber banding on the timeline….or keyframing within the effects controls of a clip.
On the timeline, it just depends on whether you’re viewing clip vs. track automation on the audio tracks.
Clip automation will (obviously) ripple with the clip…where as track level automation doesn’t…
again…I’m sure you are probably aware…just thought I’d mention it to be sure…..
Alex
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[Alex Udell] “but audio automation can be added at the clip level via rubber banding on the timeline….or keyframing within the effects controls of a clip.”
On a clip by clip basis. But if you use the Audio Mixer to mix your timeline, all keyframes will remain in timeline position, they are not added to the clips. So if you start moving your clips around, you’re screwed with the current operation of the Audio Mixer. That’s why we don’t use it.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Exactly.
The way you write it, one might think it wasn’t available at all…
just wanting to make it clear.
🙂
Alex
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The audio mixer is a joke, to be sure, however, coming from audio DAWs, I’m not sure the industry standard mixer setup is going to quite make you happy, either. The one thing that video NLEs have that most DAWs don’t (though I hear Cubase has some form of this), is clip-based effects. That’s not a standard audio feature at all, and honestly, I don’t believe it should haveto be. The only reason I use clip based audio effects at all is because the mixer is so incredibly terrible. Had it been setup like any other even rudimentary DAW, there would be little need, and it would be easy to just do away with clip-based audio effects all together. A standard DAW keeps most data on the track level (not clip-level), but usually moves the data seamlessly along with the clip, so you get the best of both worlds: global track effects, but with content-aware data points.
However, Premiere’s audio mixer is beyond “dumbed down” to the point of lunacy. The fact is, so many video producers also know there way around DAWs that it would have been far more intuitive just to use the traditional DAW philosophy instead of re-inventing the wheel. now you’ve confused all of audio professionals, and made it no easier on the video-only crowd either.
The lack of true audio buses is really bizarre. Any audio engineer worth two cents sends half their tracks to aux buses for additive processing. Premiere has this, but instead of having actual bus streams, it has this bizarre “send to aux track” system, where you send the signal to a track directly, instead of a specific data stream. This may sound like a minor difference, but it makes some processing cumbersome, if not impossible. For instance, side-chaining and ducking, which are commonplace in the TV production world, are almost impossible since ducking relies on pulling a signal off of an external audio stream (bus). There is a very crazy workaround using a Russian-made VST compressor plugin, but it requires something like 6 submix tracks, and is very difficult to control.
Now, I understand that the average video editor isn’t going to be doing advanced signal processing, but a lot of the other choices Adobe has made are very unfortunate as well. One would expect that since the audio mixer uses the same audio system and effects (VSTs) as the clip-based effect system, why not just allow for loading effects directly off the effects palette? There-for you could create presets, copy data, etc. The VST architecture allows for its own preset-saving system, and somehow Adobe has chosen to completely ignore this feature.
And finally, the “only one VST open at a time” thing is beyond strange. I actually think I know what is going on, though, because I’ve been working with a VI-host programmer on the side, and know a bit about how these things are constructed. Audio effects tend to reuse the same interface window objects over and over again. Each time an effect is called up, it calls up a pre-existing window object into memory. Behind the scenes, there are actually only a few effects place-holders, and they rotate around when a new one is called up. It’s how you can switch so quickly from one sequence to another and not have to reload the audio system. However, most hosts dynamically create new effects placeholder objects on the fly every time you add one over the current limit. It’s pretty basic, really, just assign a new object and you’re done. But Premiere seems to only have one effect window object… maybe two… I think one for mono and one for stereo (these are actually completely different types of VSTs). So you open one, and it has to kill the interface object for the other to reuse the same data. Usually that’s what you do when switching sequences (that’s how MOTU does multi-sequence projects in Digital Performer, for instance) but why would you do that between different effects in the same sequence? It’s not like they take up a huge amount of processing power or RAM? After all, these same exact VSTs are being used by the dozens in a typical DAW project.
What amazes me is not that Adobe hasn’t fixed these shortcomings, it’s that they have ignored them in the face of doing a whole lot of other things that seems really inconsequential by comparison.
I do really wish the audio and video worlds would get together and learn each others’ workflows a bit more, there are aspects of each that I think would be really great to see in the other. After Effects has some KILLER workflow ideas that would be amazing in a DAW. I’d love to see javascript scripting implemented in a true DAW. Bezier curve automation is only present in a few DAWs (and even then very rudimentary). But then again, the mixing architecture of standard DAW would seem like a perfect fit in Premiere, which has completely ignored a lot of fundamental features.
Many would say, “then use a DAW for audio, and an NLE for video,” but that really shouldn’t be necessary, and is a complete cop-out. They both use the same technology, involve the same kind of interface philosophy, and it’s not as if DAWs sound better or higher quality, we’re all talking rudimentary, OS-level digital audio processing here, with the same plugin architecture. Obviously, if I want to record an album, I’m going to use a completely audio-focused environment, but it shouldn’t stop me from being able to do similar, but maybe less sophisticated, procedures an an NLE. As it is now, it feels as if Premiere is purposefully crippled to make it difficult to do standard DAW procedures. I would expect this from Avid, who wants to keep selling Pro Tools, or Apple who wants to sell Logic, but Adobe has no real foothold in the audio industry, and they’re not really trying to, so what do they have to lose?
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com
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