Premiere CS6 is crammed with new stuff, but
the best for pros are the time-savers
Adobe first took the wraps off Premiere Pro
CS6 at NAB last month, but the final software is now here – our full review
appeared last issue, available at bit.ly/mu2810 – and it sees some pretty hefty
changes compared with previous releases.
Cut
the clutter: Premiere’s new look strips a lot of the interface clutter, so you
can see more video by default
The most obvious difference in CS6 is the
interface. Ever since Premiere came back to the Mac with Cs3, each release has
pretty much the same look. There were tweaks here and there, but on the whole
it looked pretty much the same. SC6, on the other hand, looks entirely
different. The interface has been stripped of lots of clutter so that you can
see more of your video, which makes sense for a video editing application.
However, if you’re not ready for change just yet, then you can still use the
old-style look and any previous generation projects will load with the
interface layout as you had it when you last opened them.
The new layout dedicates the whole width of
the top of the screen to the Source Monitor and Program Monitor. If you’re
editing on a widescreen display, you can comfortably fit two videos side
without them feeling squished. You can further customize the interface by
removing elements like play and transport buttons below each monitor. If you
spend a lot of time editing, then chances are you haven’t actually touched
those buttons a long time, as you’ll use keyboard shortcuts instead for speed.
Fast
effect: adjustment layers let you apply the same effect to multiple clips,
although you may get unexpected results from some effects
In fact, keyboard shortcuts is one area
that has been overhauled to make Premiere Pro CS6 faster to operate. If you
don’t spend most days cutting up video, then dragging a mouse around the screen
to achieve things is fine. If you live inside Premiere, the more you can do
without taking your fingers off the keyboard, the faster you can turn projects
around. It’s changes like this, which are premiere CS6 less obvious to spot at
first glance, that are really beneficial to the video professional. For
example, you could use the Trim Monitor to fine-tune edits in CS5.5, but it was
a fairly uninviting Monitor. Pressing T on the keyboard selects the nearest
edit to the playhead and Ctrl-T toggles through the available trim types so you
can easily choose whether you want to move the edit point, or remove material
in between. The indicator helpfully changes on the timeline so you can see at a
glance the types of trim you’re about to perform.
To move the edit point, hold down Alt plus
left or right. If you’re running Lion, then you may find that Mission Control
uses these keyboard shortcuts to switch between Spaces, so you’ll need to turn
that off in Keyboard Preferences first. If that’s not enough, Adobe has even
thrown in another way to change cuts, called Dynamic Trimming. This lets you
use the J, K and L buttons to specify where the cut occurs.
These three keys are very useful for
navigating through clips or the timeline – J plays backwards, L forwards and K
stops playback. By using these in the Dynamic Trimming interface, you can
preview back and forth using the J and L keys and when you press K the edit
will move to that point. Keyboard shortcuts just for trimming clips may not
sound like much, but video editing is, ultimately, chopping up bits of video.
It’s only after you’ve done this stage that can you start applying effects and
looks to polish the final result. Anything that speeds up the grunt work is
very welcome.
Look,
no hands! The new keyboard-based trim controls let you fine-tune cuts in the
Program Monitor without taking your hands off the keyboard
The downside of all these keyboard
enhancements is that some shortcuts have changed from those you may be used to
from CS5.5 and before. You can easily switch back using the Keyboard Shortcut
preference panel, so if you really don’t want to have to learn new shortcuts,
then you can stick with what you know.
Premiere was very much tied to tape-based
production, but tapes have largely been replaced by memory cards now. CS6
introduces new features that makes working with digital files much, much
easier. So much so, it actually feels like it’s designed for modern workflows,
rather than those that were in place 20 years ago.
With the ability to shoot to reusable
memory cards, there’s more of a tendency to shoot everything and then sort it
out in the edit later. Tapes were, in theory, reusable, but in practice they’d
only be used once and then stored as an archive, so you tended to be more
careful about wasting them.
Maximum
impact: you can hide the transport control (right image) and other elements to
maximize the video window
In Premiere itself, the new large thumbnail
view lets you pinpoint the clip you’re after more quickly. Hover scrubbing,
which lets you spin through a thumbnail just by rolling left to right over it
with the mouse, is another great toll to help find the clips you want. You can
even mark in point and out points here, instead of using the Source Monitor,
which greatly speeds up compiling rough cuts.
For full-scale media management, however, Adobe
has introduced a new standalone application (with its own price tag, unless
you’re buying one of the bundles) called Prelude. This helps with the process
of ingesting media – reviewing and logging clips from a shoot before you start
editing and even batch-converting clips into different formats. Prelude is
pretty stripped back, but that’s a good thing. Since you don’t have the tools
available to drive into a full edit, you can concentrate on the task at hand
without getting distracted.
If you need to transcode formats, such as
DSLR video slips into more edit friendly formats, then Prelude will handle this
as part of the ingest process. You can add notes to video files and create
multiple subclips from a single large clip that contains usable material. Once
you’ve logged everything and chosen your subclips, you can then arrange these
into a rough cut before sending everything to Premiere for editing proper.
Clip
service: Prelude lets you define subclips and add other information about clips
to help logging
Once you’re in Premiere, you can then start
fine-tuning the edit and apply effects and transitions to polish off the final
video. Another new addition to help this process, at least in theory, is
adjustment layers. There are essentially transparent video clips to which you
can apply effects. If you have a lot of clips to which you want to apply the
same effect, rather than having to copy and paste the effect onto many
different small clips, you can simply put an adjustment layer above them all
and any clips underneath will get the right effects.
This is particularly useful if you want to
change the effect later – if you’ve applied the effect to multiple small clips,
you first have to go through and remove it from each one before pasting the new
version, which is only time consuming, but also error prone. With an adjustment
layer, you can just change it in one place and it’ll apply to every clip.
As clever as adjustment layers are, they
don’t appear to work as you’d expect with all effects. Motion adjustments, for
example, apply to the adjustment layer and not the clips underneath. If you
want to enlarge a clip or move it around the frame, you need to apply that to
the actual clip itself and not an adjustment layer. The Ultrakey effect doesn’t
appear to behave correctly removes a greenscreen background, but doesn’t let an
image underneath the video show through, which is half the point of
chromakeying.
Keys
to faster working: if you’re not ready for Premiere’s new keyboard shortcuts,
you can revert to CS5.5, or even Avid or Final Cut
Premiere CS6 is probably Adobe’s most
radical video release yet and there are lots of new features and toys to play
with, but for the professional video editor, the biggest benefit in this
release is the time-savers. These ultimately give you more time to concentrate
on the final look, instead of messing around doing the basic work.
