Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 review

Premiere Pro is a juggernaut of desktop video editing, with a vast collection of powerful tools and the weight of the Adobe Creative Suite helping it find favour among both amateur enthusiasts and professionals. Avid Media Composer dominates for broadcast and film, but in the world of web video, where production standards are just as high but teams are smaller and budgets lower, Premiere Pro has found a natural home.

Multi-camera editing is no longer limited to four cameras, and new keyboard shortcuts and split-view Monitor (top-right) make it easy to nudge edit points

It helps that it has some of the best animation tools of any general-purpose editor, giving meticulous control over the path, speed and effects settings of visual elements as they move around the frame. This sort of work used to be farmed out to specialists using dedicated compositing software, but the ability for one person to do it all in one application makes sense for web video production.

Premiere Pro CS5 looked like a professional editor but this was sometimes to its detriment. Its interface had various features that felt like a hangover from the days of tape-based video, and the dense clusters of icons and text weren’t exactly welcoming for newcomers.

CS6 introduces a sweeping redesign of the interface. The new default layout of panels reduces the number of on-screen buttons and dead space, making more room for the video. The missing buttons can be restored as required, with jog and shuttle controls being the only permanent casualties. Shuttling back and forth through clips is now possible in the Project panel, simply by moving the mouse left and right over a thumbnail. These thumbnails can be scaled up to a maximum of 546 pixels wide, and you can use keyboard shortcuts to set the in and out points without needing to use the Source monitor.

The revamped Project window (top-left) can preview and truncate clips without having to bother with the Source monitor

It’s finally possible to toggle effects on and off, adjust their settings and even add or remove effects without interrupting playback. The same goes for timeline edits, too. Combined with the loop-playback-around-marker function and various new keyboard shortcuts for nudging edit points, it’s an extremely elegant system for fine-tuning edits. Multi-camera editing is simpler to set up, and there’s theoretically no limit to the number of clips that can be combined into a single multi-camera clip.

These changes are welcome but they could have gone even further. The effects and transitions library still appears as a list of names, and many of the effects’ parameters are dense rows of text and numbers. There’s some logic to this – it dovetails with the multitrack keyframe editor – but more graphical interfaces for effects would be welcome.

Meanwhile, the timeline keeps its assortment of Selection, Ripple, Rolling, Slip, Slide, Stretch and Razor tools, which we find slower to use than Sony Vegas Pro’s smaller toolbox and solitary ripple-editing switch. Overlapping two clips in Vegas Pro adds a transition, whereas doing so in Premiere Pro unhelpfully discards the section of footage being overlapped.

Still, completely redesigning the timeline controls would probably have been a change too far for loyal users. Adobe deserves praise for streamlining the interface and speeding up everyday tasks while altering very few of the features that its users depend on.

The Three-Way Color Corrector effect is better than ever

There’s a smattering of new and improved creative tools. The highlight is the introduction of adjustment layers, which sit on a track and apply effects to all the video tracks below. It’s ideal for applying colour correction to a group of clips, stacked either horizontally or vertically. Unlike Photoshop’s limited set of adjustment layer effects, virtually all Premiere Pro’s effects can be used in this way, including distortion, blur and keying effects. The Three-Way Color Corrector effect gains finer control over the crossover between the three bands. The new Warp Stabilizer effect, inherited from After Effects 5.5, provides the best stabilisation for camera shake we’ve seen to date.

We still marginally prefer Vegas Pro for basic editing tasks. It’s less sophisticated but its streamlined set of tools shift the technicalities of editing to an almost subconscious level. Premiere Pro takes a different approach, with lots of tremendously powerful tools, each of which takes a little time to master, but which build up to an efficient editing environment. Meanwhile, its vastly superior animation, better support for nested sequences, faster preview engine and more impressive effects justify its higher price. If you want one editor that does it all, this is the one.