Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 review

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.