Creative Suite 6 offers many improvements
for video and other media editors
Review
Adobe released the sixth version of its
Creative Suite software for professional artists, designers, and videographers.
We review some of its major components below.
Audition CS6
Adobe Audition CS6 is a greatly enhanced
version of what was a solid but incomplete audio editor. New and restored features
result in an even more capable program for video, radio, and podcasts.
Audition now has a media browser for
navigating to the audio and video assets on your drive. The Skip Selection
feature lets you select audio for preview before actually cutting it. Automatic
Speech Alignment allows you to replace existing dialogue in a video clip with a
different recording of the same dialogue.
A Trim to Time Selection feature lets you
make a selection across multiple clips and trim from each. Audition CS6 supports
Open Media Framework import and export, making it compatible with a variety of
digital audio workstation applications, and it supports XMP metadata, allowing
it to work with radio automation systems.
Restored features include support for
control surfaces (hardware mixing boards for controlling audio applications).
Working with control surfaces is enhanced by the program’s restored track
parameter automation feature, which lets you easily record changes to volume,
pan, EQ, and effects as you mix. Audio pros not looking for advanced music
features now have reason to give Audition CS6 a try, especially if they work
with Premiere files.
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Details
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Manufacture Adobe
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Website adobe.com
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Price $349
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Rating 4/5;
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Dreamweaver CS6
Adobe Dreamweaver is a solid Web
development tool that includes a code editor, a visual design mode, sophisticated
Cascading Style Sheet tools for creating, editing, and managing CSS, and
numerous site management features. And Adobe has added tools to work with new
CSS properties, to build mobile-ready websites, and to use Adobe’s related
services – Business Catalyst, a commercial Web hosting platform, and PhoneGap
Build, a cloud-basrd service for compiling apps for mobile platforms.
Its Web Fonts Manager simplifies the
process of using such fonts. However, Dreamweaver doesn’t provide tools for
working with common Web-type services such as Google’s free Web font service or
Adobe’s own TypeKit. CSS Transitions, which lets you animate changes in CSS
over a prescribed period of time, is limited to the few changes of state
available to CSS.
And Dreamweaver doesn’t provide the same
support for popular CSS3 properties like box shadow, text shadow, border
radius, and gradients. Nor does Dreamweaver CS6 have tools for inserting or
managing HTML5 tags such as <video>, <audio>, <header>,
<section>, or <article>.
Dreamweaver CS6 is a powerful Web builder
with great code-editing, CSS, and site-management capabilities. But it seems to
be slipping behind in some core technologies that Web designers rely on. A lack
of HTML5 tools, disorganized CSS creation, and an ineffective design view make
it difficult to build sites using contemporary standards and techniques.
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Details
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Manufacture Adobe
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Website adobe.com
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Price $399
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Rating 31/2/5
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Flash Professional CS6
Flash Professional CS6 is a powerful
authoring environment for creating animation and multimedia content for
immersive interactivity cross desktops, devices, tablets, smartphones, and
televisions. The largest markets for such technology are mobile games and
devices, and Adobe has focused on these categories.
Its new sprite sheet feature allows you to
convert vector art animations into bitmaps, saved in a single large image file.
Not only does Flash CS6 make the process of creating sprite sheets easier than
in the past, but using them also lets you quickly and efficiently adapt your
game to different devices. Flash CS6 features Adobe AIR mobile simulation, so
you can test for accelerometer and GPS functions; the simulator permits you to
enter GPS coordinates to see how your app would respond. Also new and useful is
SDK support for multiple AIR versions.
Adobe is offering a way to create enhanced
realism and fluidity with Flash Professional CS6. This upgrade is a must-have
for game developers.
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Details
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Manufacture: Adobe
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Website: adobe.com
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Price: $699
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Rating: 4.5/5
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Illustrator CS6
Illustrator CS6 – the program’s 16th
release – offers an interface overhaul, an engine tune-up, and three major new
features: Gradient on Strokes, Pattern Creation, and Image Trace. The program
has adopted a low-contrast and gorgeously consistent grayscale chic with
redrawn icons, reworded toolbars, and tidied panels.
Illustrator CS6 is an important release: It
has migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit and has gotten a speed boost in redrawing
and saving complex artwork.
One clever new feature lets you quickly
create complex patterns that you can apply to any object as a fill.
Unfortunately, the patterns often show seams on screen – and if the pattern
tile includes decimal measurements, the seams carry over into file exports. In
CS6, Image Trace has replaced Live Trace, improving ease of use, efficiency,
and speed. Tracing is also much simpler. If you’re not quite satisfied with the
preset’s output, you can always fine-tune it. Just one quibble: Image Trace
still doesn’t permit you to ignore an image background if it is predominantly
one color, other than white.
Illustrator users often find the
application difficult to master because it requires constant toggling between
tools, a chore that is most efficiently accomplished via keyboard shortcuts.
This still leaves room for improvement.
Illustrator CS6 feels less like a full
upgrade than a refinement. Even so, if you’ll make heavy use of the new tools,
upgrading will be worthwhile.
Faster
Operations: Illustrator CS6 features a speed boost in redrawing and saving
complex artwork.
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Details
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Manufacture Adobe
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Website adobe.com
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Price $599
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Rating 4/5
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Premiere Pro CS6
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6’s interface has a
comprehensive redesign that improves editing workflow. The latest release also
integrates two newcomers to Creative Suite: Adobe Prelude for ingesting and
logging file based media, and Adobe SpeedGrade, a color correction and grading
tool. The companion DVD authoring program, Encore, is now a 64-bit application.
The Project panel has enhancements to fully
employ the icon view’s visual approach to organizing clips. You can scrub video
playback (without audio) by moving the mouse pointer over a thumbnail image;
called hover scrub, this method provides a much better reminder of a clip’s
contents. The displays for source and edited video are the most conspicuous
change. You get a more streamlined arrangement of controls.
In Premiere Pro CS6, you can set markers
with a simple default keyboard shortcut. The new Markers panel lists a selected
clip or sequence’s markers with their thumbnail icons and comments. Scan the
comments, and you’ll easily find the frame each one refers to.
Premiere Pro CS6’s trimming mode feels more
integrated; it also shows off it improved playback performance. The master
audio meters are more precise, scaling according to how you resize the panel.
This update also has several subtle changes to the Audio Mixer.
Premiere Pro CS6 makes its Three-Way Color
Correction effect more intuitive, introduces a Rolling Shutter Repair effect,
and borrows After Effects’ Warp Stabilizer. But the ability to apply an effect
to clips just by double-clicking will make the biggest difference in an
editor’s routine.
Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine now takes
advantage of GPUs found in certain MacBook Pros. Even without this help, video
performance has improved. The interface responds to trackpad gestures.
Premiere Pro CS6 stands on its own merits,
extending the performance gains of CS5 to mobile editors. What makes CS6 a
worthy upgrade is its focus on enhancing fluent video editing.
Fluid
Editing: Both in trimming mode and in the Timeline, it is now easier to perform
different types of edits in Premiere Pro without making a trip to the Tools
panel
