Adobe Announces Production Premium CS6

[Ann Bens]

The issue with Encore reversing the fields with HD to SD coming from Premiere via DL has been fixed in CS6.

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Pete Bauer

... and Adobe Speedgrade, an amazingly powerful color correction application.

I'll upgrade for Speedgrade alone. All the rest (and there's a lot) is just gravy.

[Chris Barcellos]

Did someone post the expected upgrade charge from CS5.5 ??

[Kevin Currie]

Any changes or improvements to Encore in CS6?

[Harm Millaard]

What about all 64 bit architecture, the lifting of the 99 limit on still shows, the better color management for menus and buttons à la PS?

[Vincent Oliver]

Originally Posted by Bruce Watson

I'll upgrade for Speedgrade alone. All the rest (and there's a lot) is just gravy.

It's often the gravy that adds extra flavour to a meal.

Not sure about the Speedgrade feature at the moment, it does seem like you can achieve a lot with Adjustment layers. I am all in favour for producing better colour in any production, so may hold back on an opinion until I have had a go with the Speedgrade

[Pete Bauer]

Adobe Encore Gets More Muscle

As Harm noted, Encore is now native 64 bit. You’d expect this to result in performance improvements and it does. One function that definitely benefits is MPEG2 import. Upon import, Encore indexes MPEG2 files and checks to determine if they are DVD and Blu-ray legal. This process is now done in the background so system resources are quickly released during import. That means you can continue working on other tasks instead of waiting for the import to finish. During this background process, the files are displayed as Pending Media in italics text.

Additionally, proxy creation for stills and slideshows has been moved out of the import process to render time, thus greatly speeding imports.

Some enhancements and new features:

• Yes, as Ann pointed out, much to the joy of those who have posted about this issue previously, imported files that are Upper Field First will now have that setting preserved for DVDs in Encore CS6.
• To add to Harm’s mention of the 99 slide limit, Blu-ray support is 999 slides per show. There is no limit at all in DVDs but beyond 999 slides, you cannot use Manual Advance on your remote control for individual slides in the last chapter. Adobe does note that slide counts above 200 may start having noticeable impacts on system performance.
• For Blu-ray and Flash exports, there is now an option to export 8-bit color buttons, instead of limiting them to 2-bit to comply with the DVD restriction (which is still part of the DVD spec and therefore cannot be changed). Blu-ray pop-up menus also have much improved color quality over previous versions.
• Blu-ray chapter lists are now supported. Choices for playlist organization include sequential, random, and shuffle.
• Coding changes make the CTI more responsive to prevent the stuttering sometimes seen in prior versions.
• Pixel aspect ratio correction has been improved in the Preview simulator. This will eliminate some button distortions and black bars we sometimes saw in times past.
• Web DVD support is now as fully featured as DVD and blu-ray, including multi-page menus including pop-ups, presets for bit rates and quality, button transitions, subtitle menu setup, and more.
• Limited DTS HD import capability. You can import, add the file to a timeline, and build a Blu-ray disc from that timeline. I say “limited” because you cannot play a DTS HD file within Encore, modify the file, use it in a motion menu, or use it for Flash or DVD projects.
• Auto-fix Subtitle Gaps: The Blu-Ray spec requires a minimum 5 frames between subtitle clips. If the gap is less, Encore will display an error to alert you. Just right click one of the problematic clips and choose Fix Gaps from the context menu, and the minimum number of frames needed to fix the problem will be automatically trimmed.

A cross-application feature worth mentioning is preview integration. Adobe Encore CS6, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, After Effects and Audition all share a single media cache database that points to preview files that any of these applications can read and write to. If you change the location of the database in any of these applications, even if each application has its own cache folder, the pointers are updated in all of the applications.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Sounds very interesting. Any details on Photoshop?

[David Knaggs]

Originally Posted by Pete Bauer

Blu-ray chapter lists are now supported. Choices for playlist organization include ...

Music to my ears!

I have a client who wants the Blu-rays to play only one chapter at a time and then return to the menu. The first one had 57 chapters and, in the end, I had to t-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y export 57 separate movies from my NLE to get this concept to work in Encore with Blu-ray. And last week I had to export 30 separate movies (chapters) for another Blu-ray. So this new blu-ray chapter playlist support will save me a great deal of wasted time (not to mention the annoyance).

Also good to hear that Premiere Pro is improving its ability to export. Hopefully this will include 1080p ProRes QuickTimes (CS5.5 seems only to give the option to export a QuickTime in the frame size for DV).

I sincerely hope that PPro CS6 implements a more robust import function (for timelines from FCP 7). So far, for me, it's been a bust. It'll import simple 30 minute timelines, but the timelines I really need it to import are extremely long and very, very complex and PPro CS5.5 can't handle them at all.

I've been using After Effects and Photoshop on my current project and both are brilliant! How did I ever live without them? I've now kicked most of my old FCS to the kerb but I've still had to keep using my old FCP as my NLE until I can find one to move forward with which will reliably import old FCP projects (which I am often called on to update).

If PPro CS6 can handle this, it'll make my "switch" to the Adobe suite of tools complete.

[Pete Bauer]

Originally Posted by Kawika Ohumukini

Sounds very interesting. Any details on Photoshop?

It's already in public beta. You can download it now. See this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...oshop-cs6.html

[John Richard]

Pete - thanks SO MUCH for the details.

Do you know if Encore can now truly handle 2 Pass VBR - either import of previously encoded 2 pass VBR files from Adobe Media Encoder or using a customer preset within Encore?

[Harm Millaard]

Import of 2-pass VBR encoded media has always been possible, such as those encoded by PR. If they did not import properly, it was because the encoder used did not generate legal formats. Export from EN using 2-pass VBR has also been possible without difficulties, so my question is, what happened in your case?

[Thomas Smet]

This is one heck of an update and the new Photoshop is worth the price of the suite upgrade alone. In fact each application is almost worth the price alone. For me being a 17" MBP user this version is going to be huge since it finally supports the gpu for full Mercury Playback Engine gpu acceleration with the OpenCL based AMD gpus in the highend MBP's. My days of itching to move back to a PC are officially now over.

One thing I would like to know is if ProRes performance is a bit better with CS6? I always found ProRes files to be sluggish in CS5.5 during scrubbing compared to FCP7 or even FCPX. I love native editing of AVCHD material in CS5.5 but sometimes I do work with ProRes files from an Atomos unit or Blackmagic and Matorx cards and would love to see the files scrub as smooth as butter. Since Adobe is trying to cater to the FCP users I hope they looked into this a bit.

[Mark Silva]

Pete, can encore cs 6, import multichannel surround pcm uncompressed audio now?

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Thanks for the updates Pete.

Cheers