I’ve been hopping back and forth between FCP X and Premiere CS5.5 for the last couple of months. FCP X for the quick turnaround project and Premiere for the longer more ‘serious’ projects. The reason was simple: FCP X has the fastest workflow because of hoverscrub. The ability to mouse over clips for instant playback speeds up everything and FCP X had a easier interface for color correction.
Now CS6 has brought over all the best parts of FCP X and more. It was love at first sight.
Every professional feature is still here, Adobe must have been listening to the FCP X haters. Good move.
My second favorite feature here is the RED workflow. I can literally drop .r3d files right onto the timeline and even adjust every setting you will find in REDCINE X including ISO, white balance, etc etc. Oh and playback is pretty smooth on my hackintosh. I can finally work with red files the same way I have with DSLRs.
Here’s a quick video demonstrating how to use this feature-
I’ve only worked with CS6 for a few hours but another huge improvement is a pretty simple one- bigger volume bars. It’s just much easier on the eyes.
Now this wouldn’t be a honest review if I didn’t point out the flaws. So far the only glaring issue is bugs. This is a new release so that’s kind of a given, the bug I encountered was the inability to accept certain batches of my .r3d files but I found a workaround, simply move the files to a different folder and try importing again.
Also I’m not a fan of Adobe’s pricing system… I bought CS5 with the academic discount for a decent price… but then CS5.5 came along and there wasn’t a upgrade path for academics so I would have to pay more than I paid for CS5 itself to upgrade to CS5.5
Now with CS6 the upgrade from CS5 costs $750 dollars… ouch. But there’s hope, the academic price of CS6 production suite is $450.
Once again, buying the program itself is cheaper than upgrading it. That’s messed up.
There’s another pricing option- a subscription based model. You pay Adobe $50 dollars a month to access all of their apps. And yes you can work offline, you just need to go online once a month for the license check… for anyone who has bought a previous CS product you can get this service for $30 a month for the first year by using this link.
In my opinion, the $30 a month is decent if you use most of the apps but that equals $360 the first year and then $600 next year (unless you get academic pricing which factors out to $30 a month)… if you find someone who’s still in school you should give them the money to get the academic pricing because rather than pay a total of $960 (or $720 academic) for two years you could have it for $450 by buying the academic edition of the full production suite.
But hey always try before buying- Here’s the link to the 30 day trial.
Great overview of some of the new features below-