It’s been a little over a week since CS6 Dropped. I’ve been nerding out with my nerds at the nerdery for the past few days. After one week of use, I, as well as my whole production company have switched to Premiere Pro CS6 for our editing needs.

Like I’ve written before, to me, Premiere has always been the solution I would go to if I couldn’t get to a system running FCP. I have had a PC at home all my life, and just recently got a Mac (mostly for FCP). But that was before the FCPX hoopla… I guess you never know what the future will bring.

So, when we were at NAB in April, we went over to see the new CS6 presentation with a bit of a “Lets see how Premiere is almost as good as FCP7″ mindset. Last year, I would have probably walked away with the same feeling, but we all agreed CS6 actually looked pretty good.

My beefs with Premiere CS5.5

I can probably go on for a while about how much I was NOT impressed by earlier versions of Adobe Premiere, but I’ll spare you, and just give you a quick list.

• It supposedly played just about anything, but in my experience, it still seemed hard to do. Granted, I didn’t have blazing fast machines, but from what I found, it was nothing but problems like random artifacts, banding, and out of sync audio. Other user’s experience I’m told was different, but for me, it kinda sucked.
• If you drag a clip into a timeline with different settings, it just throws it in there. That would be fine unless you are actually trying to match the sequence settings to the clip. Then you have to open Sequence Settings, and poke around until you THINK you got everything just right, and even then, there’s no way to tell.
• Want to export H.264 for web? Great. Want it to be 5 times bigger than it should be for no good reason? Great! Cause that’s what you get. Seriously?
• Want to alt-drag to copy a clip? Too bad.
• I hate the CS5 interface. Too many buttons, to cluttered. It’s like using broken Final Cut.
• Want to export an XML? Sorry, that barely works, you might get lucky and have it work, but rarely in my experience.
• Work with proxies? Premiere CS5 has no idea what they are or how to deal with them. And you can’t switch out lo-rez for hi-rez by offlining clips like in FCP, because if Premiere can get it’s little fingers out to where the lo-rez files were originally, it’ll just find them again. So now you have to actually remove the proxies from your system so it can find the hi res files.
• Want to add a fade to a clip? Well, you can drag one down from the effects panel, or draw one in with the pen. Sorry, you don’t get to add one by right clicking. Lets just make a simple thing take 10 times longer than it needs to!

The items above may seem like little things, but they’re a big deal if you have to deal with them every day many many times. It gets old fast. So basically I’ve been ignoring Adobe Premiere and all the people raving about how great it is. For the past couple of years I’ve been saying “Give me good old FCP7. It works, it’s slick, and I like how it feels.” A stark contrast to my comments on Premiere Pro: “It’s broken, I’m mad, and Isn’t it supposed to be able to handle that?”

Adobe Premiere CS6, Boom! That just happened.

Well, I downloaded CS6 on Monday. My day job is at a little company called The Division. We make a handful of television shows that are distributed worldwide. And we do all of our editing on Final Cut Pro 7, mix with Soundtrack Pro, and grade with Apple Color. We love FCP Studio 3. We have been using it since it came out and it’s been nothing but good to us.

However, one of the things we happen to do quite a bit is mix cameras, formats, framerates, and anything else we can throw into the mix. We’re often mixing several HDSLRs with action cameras, consumer cameras, older tape-based formats, youtube rips, and even iPhone footage. Each and every one of those has to be conformed into a common format so they play nicely together on a FCP timeline. That takes time. Usually, time we don’t have.

So here’s what we’re faced with: We got lots of footage in all kinds of formats. We are used to using proxies to keep file sizes and render times down. We need to make sure our third party software and hardware keeps working with our editing system. Well, on Wednesday, I said to my good friend / editing ninja, Sam. “Hey, you have two options. 1) Cut this segment together tomorrow on FCP7 after the files are conformed, and then transcoded into proxies. Or 2) Edit it in Premiere CS6 right now.” The answer seemed obvious. We were able to get a rough cut to the network by the end of the day, instead of the end of the week. That alone can make Premiere a serious consideration for a company like ours.

My new beef list for CS6

After spending a week with Adobe Premiere CS6, I have revisited my list of complaints:

• I keep throwing formats at Premiere CS6 with no problem.
• Dragging a clip to an empty timeline now opens a window to ask if you want to conform the timeline settings to the clip.
• H.264 compresses beautifully into a teeny-tiny movie file.
• Want to alt-drag to copy a clip? Awesome. Do it. It works great!
• I love the CS6 interface. They got rid of buttons, they got rid of clutter. It’s like using streamlined Final Cut.
• Want to export an XML? Awesome, so does Premiere.
• Work with proxies? Ok, just re-link them like you do in FCP.
• Right click the end of a clip to add a default transition (a fade). Thank you!

Sorry Apple, I’ll have to go with Adobe on this one.

Today, after one week of trying out Creative Suite CS6. We have officially switched to editing all future projects in Adobe Premiere CS6. I’m not trying to be an Adobe fanboy, or add to the hype. I just find Premiere CS6 more enjoyable, and a solution that makes sense for me. Not to mention that Adobe fixed just about every complaint I had with Premiere. What am I going to do, ignore it? I have been very impressed with the improvements made in CS6, and I wouldn’t be surprised in a few years if we look at CS6 release as the major paradigm shift in post production.

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