Adobe will showcase new software and video technology that is transforming the way broadcasters, filmmakers and video professionals create and deliver high-quality productions across multiple screens.

I recently attended an Adobe press event at their headquarters in San Jose to preview some of their pro video tools. Adobe experts gave us working demos of Premiere Pro, After Effects, SpeedGrade, Audition, Prelude, Story, and showcased their brand new platform, Adobe Anywhere.

For the past several years, Adobe has been hitting it out of the park with their Creative Suite, especially since the release of Apple’s Final Cut Pro X. And since they released their Creative Cloud in the past year, professional editors in droves have been making the switch, which has given Adobe more marketshare in the competitive NLE marketplace.

By the way, Adobe just announced they are offering Creative Cloud memberships for only $29.99/month for the first year, which is 40% off the regular price of a membership. Perhaps the biggest benefit of being a Creative Cloud subscriber is you get access to the latest upgrades and features of the suite as soon as they are released – at no additional cost.

The New Premiere Pro

As you all know, there really isn’t one single way to edit and with the new version of Premiere Pro (not sure if they are using 6.5, 7, or getting rid of numbers altogether), Adobe is introducing new features that will enable editors to work the way they feel most comfortable.

There are too many new features to mention but here are a few of the highlights:

Editing Finesse allows you to work more efficiently with Premiere Pro’s redesigned timeline, intuitive track targeting, and dozens of new shortcuts. There are new dupe-detection markers, through-edit indicators, and clearer labels to show start/end of media provide critical information at a glance. Source sequences can now be edited into other sequences without nesting, retaining all of their component tracks and clips. Speed up your workflow with handy new tools, such as Paste Attributes for copying effects from one clip to another.

Premiere Pro’s new Lumetri Deep Color Engine applies improved color grading looks directly in Premiere Pro. There’s a new Lumetri Looks folder in the Effects panel where you can apply preset color grading effects as easily as adding a dissolve. You can also use the Lumetri effect to locate exported .looks from SpeedGrade or LUTs from other systems.

Premiere Pro supports Closed Captioning with a workflow designed for editors. You can easily import, view, edit, and adjust positioning and layout of closed captions. When finished, you can export media with embedded closed captioning, or export closed captioning as a separate file.

A More Refined After Effects

After Effects' Refine Edge tool enables faster and superior rotoscoping results.

The new version of After Effects will give users more tools to work dynamically in 3D and offers better rotoscoping and stabilization tools.  Adobe has recently partnered up with Maxon and their popular 3D graphics application Cinema 4D. You can now insert 3D objects directly into After Effects compositions thanks to the new Live 3D Pipeline with MAXON CINEMA 4D Lite, which will be included in the new version of After Effects. There’s also a new Refine Edge Tool that will save you time with better results than ‘old-school’ frame-by-frame rotoscoping. You can use the tool to separate challenging foreground elements – such as frizzy hair or soft edges – from poorly lit or complex backgrounds.

The Warp Stabilizer was one of the most popular tools in After Effects and Adobe installed it with the last version of Premiere Pro. After Effects new Warp Stabilizer VFX does an even better job of smoothing out shaky handheld footage and also allows you to reverse stabilize. What’s super cool is that you can now select objects within a scene to stabilize while leaving others unstable, or stabilize an entire scene to do detailed work such as painting or warping, and then restore the  jitter to get the shot you want exactly.

Color It With SpeedGrade

Adobe acquired SpeedGrade from Iridas last year and smartly included it in CS 6. Now Adobe has done a complete overhaul of SpeedGrade’s UI so Premiere Pro users will see familiar placement of screen elements such as the new media browser, a redesigned autofit monitor, a new Look Manager, and integrated grading and mask panes. The new SpeedGrade also offers GPU-accelerated performance and broader camera support, including RAW, HDR, and stereo 3D content. Some of the new tools include the Snapshot Browser, gorgeous film stock emulations, Luma Waveform display, Mercury Transmit support for external reference monitoring, and more. With the new Shot Matcher, you can make sure your shots are accurately matched and deliver beautifully styled projects using powerful layer-based tools for color correction and look design. Resize and reframe your final masters for virtually any display format.

At the heart of SpeedGrade is the new Lumetri Deep Color Engine – a GPU-accelerated 32-bit floating-point image-processing technology that offers maximum scope for working with HDR content, allowing you to pull details from blacks and highlights that normally would have been lost.

Prepare With Prelude

Adobe has updated Prelude with new features, including the ability to scrub thumbnails in the project panel.

Adobe builds on Prelude, which like SpeedGrade, made its debut in CS6. The new Prelude offers a more unified interface that allows for easier ingest and logging that will let you work faster, keep your project organized and streamline the entire workflow process from ingest to output. Prelude also saves you time with a more intuitive, keyboard-driven workflow and allows you to create temporal markers and other searchable metadata while keeping you focused on the big picture. With expanded file support for ingest and transcoding, Prelude accelerates shot-logging with new features like hover scrubbing thumbnails in the Project panel, file renaming during ingest, and metadata templates which ensure that key information is always added. You can also export rough cuts directly through Adobe Media Encoder to share your vision on multiple devices. Prelude is also supported for the new Adobe Anywhere and Adobe Story screenwriting and production scheduling software.

Picturing Sound With Audition

New creative tools in Adobe Audition include Sound Remover and Preview Editor to help improve overall sound quality.

Now I’m not really an audio guy but the new Adobe Audition demo blew me away. Audition allows you to visualize sound as you work with it, whether in the improved multitrack environment, as traditional waveforms, or using the Spectral Frequency Display where you can isolate and repair elements in your tracks. You can think of it like an aural Photoshop with Photoshop style tools that enable you to isolate and remove sirens or planes over dialogue like you would with blemishes on a pretty face. Audition has better integration with Premiere Pro and contains a number of new native filters and effects for fast fixes and audio enhancements. Before you deliver, Audition’s new ITU Loudness meter makes it easy to ensure that your work meets broadcast standards.

Story Plus

Not only is Adobe Story Plus trying to capture some of Final Draft’s marketshare but can also close in on budgeting and scheduling stalwart Movie Magic Scheduling. As a screenwriting program, Story offers easy-to-use writing features such as automatic script formatting, outline mode, version comparisons, and cast and location lists. Story Plus also has powerful scheduling tools that sync with your script to facilitate planning and communication between writing teams, production crews, directors, and producers. If you’re shooting several scripts together, such as a block of episodes for TV, create a common schedule from multiple scripts.

Anywhere Is Better Than Here

They’ve been teasing it all year and finally Adobe Anywhere is here. Anywhere is a workflow platform that enables teams using Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Prelude to collaborate on a project in different locations. Say if you’re shooting in a film in LA and your editor is in London. While signed into Anywhere using Premiere Pro or Prelude, you can import your shots and while you’re sleeping in LA, your editor is hard at work to give you a rough cut of your scene when you wake up the next morning.

Anywhere has an open platform architecture that includes use of your existing infrastructure and integration with standard IT hardware, software, and network processes. Your files are hosted on-premise, although you do have to have access to your own network server.

The cool thing about Anywhere is you don’t have to perform any heavy file transfers nor view highly compressed and re-sized proxy files. With Anywhere, you can pretty much view your files in high quality at their native size (although I’m sure some compression has to be implemented). You can log, edit, share and finish your media simultaneously, from virtually any location there is a high-speed network connection.

Adobe Anywhere works with the Creative Cloud and can collaborate with enterprise-ready production workflows. Two key components of Adobe Anywhere include the Adobe Mercury Streaming Engine and the Adobe Anywhere Collaboration Hub. With the Adobe Mercury Streaming Engine, video professionals can eliminate hours of time spent transferring or duplicating large files and give team members instant access to files from anywhere. The Adobe Anywhere Collaboration Hub removes the boundaries between project files and allows multiple people to use different applications to access work on the same project files at the same time. And, to support the Adobe Anywhere open platform, Adobe is collaborating with industry-leading companies including Dell, EMC Isilon, Harmonic, HP, NVIDIA, Quantum StorNext, and Supermicro.

For further details on Adobe Anywhere, please visit http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeanywhere.html.

For more information on Adobe Broadcast solutions, please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/broadcast.

Adobe's new CS6 Production Premium is their biggest release in a decade

It goes without saying that the production industry has seen some significant changes in the past couple of years. Disruptive camera technology (RED ONE, Canon 5D Mark II, etc.) has created a new industry in which low-budget filmmakers can now compete with studios in delivering a professional looking film. The post-production industry is no different with off-the-shelf, all-in-one editing and finishing suites that have given editors, visual effects artists and colorists the ability to finish projects on laptops with affordable software packages costing in the thousands of dollars rather than the tens of thousands.

Last year at this time marked a major disruption in the post-production market. Apple released Final Cut Pro X for a low price point of $299 and the professional editing community was turned on its head. Not only did the program lack many professional features editors were accustomed to, they also couldn’t open up previous Final Cut Pro projects. In the past year Apple has quickly released numerous updates through their Mac App store to get its FCP X up to speed but the damage was done, enabling Adobe to increase their market share for CS5 and 5.5 Mac licenses up over 40%.

Another big reason why many indie filmmakers have made the switch over to Adobe was the DSLR effect. DSLRs like the Canon 5D Mark II created a new army of filmmakers who were eager to begin editing their footage. Since you weren’t able to work natively with the DSLR’s H.264 codec with Final Cut Pro 7 and earlier versions, Adobe quickly latched on to these new filmmakers because Premiere Pro was one of the first NLEs to enable this. For professionals, companies including the BBC, CBS Sports Network, CNN, Hearst, Media General and NRK started using the Creative Suite Production Premium for their file-based workflows. I recently had the opportunity to meet with Ellen Wixted, Sr. Project Manager, Adobe Systems, Al Mooney, Project Manger, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Steve Forde, Sr. Project Manager, Adobe After Effects to discuss the latest version of Creative Suite – CS6 Production Premium.

Last year’s CS5.5 was a big upgrade with their Mercury Playback Engine broadening its GPU hardware support to laptops and more supported cards, which gave users real-time feedback, higher resolutions, and the ability to work natively with almost any format. At NAB 2012, people were expecting big things, especially with Autodesk announcing a new version of Smoke for $3,495.

Well, Adobe did not disappoint and announced Creative Suite 6 Production Premium, which features big updates to Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Story, Media Encoder, and Photoshop. CS6 is also releasing two new programs to the suite: SpeedGrade for color grading and Prelude for complex workflow. There’s also better integration between the programs so you can move shots or sequences in a more efficient manner. According to Adobe, CS6 is their biggest release in a decade.

Here are some of the updates and highlights from programs for CS6:

Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro CS6 is definitely not your father’s Premiere. In terms of power, the new and enhanced Mercury Playback Engine lets you do a number of new things, such as scrubbing clips, perform multi-format sequences in HD, 5K and even higher resolutions.

Adobe has completely redesigned the Premiere Pro’s UI, making the editing process more intuitive. Some new features include dynamic timeline trimming, Warp Stabilizer, which was previously in After Effects, a revamped Three-Way Color Corrector, expanded multi-cam support and more.

The first thing you’ll notice when opening Premiere Pro CS6 is the new UI. There’s a new “two-up” workspace that shows your Source Monitor and Program monitor taking up the entire upper half of the screen. You can also view your Source or Program monitor in full screen, which you couldn’t do before. Below, in the newly designed Project Panel, there are now 16×9 panels (you can also view these in list) and Adobe has employed a scrub-like feature they’re calling Hover Scrub. Similar to Final Cut Pro X’s scrubbing feature, you’re now able to view clips just by guiding your mouse over a clip to view a shot. Since most editors use key strokes (e.g., J, K, L, etc.) Adobe has really refined the UI to show more video and less grey borders. In terms of controls, you can also manually remove certain buttons with a Button Editor beneath your Source and Program monitors to give your UI an even cleaner look. Pretty much everything within the workspace is now customizable, which is exactly what editors want.

Every year there seems to be an influx of new formats and resolutions. One of the Premiere Pro’s biggest strengths was its versatility with working with a variety of codecs such as H.264 and AVCHD. Premiere Pro CS6 allows you to work natively with the RED Scarlet-X, EPIC, ARRI ALEXA, and the Canon C300.

Another long awaited new feature is an advanced Trim Mode in the Program Monitor panel, which allows you to do more precise edits. When in Trim mode, it changes to a two-up display and you’re able to keep track of trimming by frame by frame both visually and audibly. (In Premiere Pro CS5.5, you could only keep track either visually or audibly.) This is an important feature that professional editors have been asking for.

One of the most popular features in CS5.5 was the Warp Stabilizer in After Effects. The Warp Stabilizer takes shaky handheld footage and smoothes it out to make it look as if it were shot on a Steadicam. What’s great about the feature is that it not only smoothes a shot out, but it also removes motion artifacts that would remain after stabilization. The Warp Stabilizer function is now in Premiere Pro and it gives you even more control and refinement such as reducing the amount of cropping and scaling, as well as the degree of smoothing. For indie filmmakers who can’t afford to work with a dolly or Steadicam, the Warp Stabilizer can add production value.

After Effects's new Global Performance Cache makes the program faster and more powerful

After Effects

Although most editors are not motion graphics designers or visual effects artists, with shrinking budgets, today’s filmmakers and editors are being asked to tackle some of these duties in post-production. After Effects has long been an industry standard for motion graphics and effects but editors have also been using the program for color correction, motion tracking, keying and rotoscoping. After Effects CS6 is faster and more responsive than previous AE releases and Adobe has made it even easier to integrate with other programs. They’ve added and/or updated over 80 built-in effects.

The newest and most talked about new feature within After Effects is the Global Performance Cache, which makes AE faster and more powerful. It consists of new technologies, including a global RAM cache, a persistent disk cache and a new graphics pipeline. According to Adobe, early tests performed by NVIDIA AE functions have improved by a factor of 1.5 to 2.5x with some up to 16 times faster than before (depending on your hardware configuration).

Another new feature is the 3D Camera Tracker that analyzes the motion in 2D; computes the position, orientation and field of view of the camera that shot the scene, and then creates a new 3D camera in After Effects to match. The new 3D layers have the same movement and perspective as the original footage and you can insert these objects into existing scenes.

The negative effects of rolling shutter from CMOS sensors in cameras are a major problem for most shooters, especially for DSLR filmmakers. Wobble and skew are the main issues from rolling shutter in which following a moving subject can cause distortions (e.g., a leaning building or an elongated car driving by). AE6 now has an advanced Rolling Shutter Repair drag and drop effect that contains two algorithms to help straighten out this problematic footage.

SpeedGrade

Last year, Adobe made big news by purchasing SpeedGrade from IRIDAS. SpeedGrade is a professional color grading and finishing software, which previously sold for $20,000. SpeedGrade is now included in CS6 and is a native 64-bit app that offers GPU-accelerated performance and format support, including RAW, HDR, and stereoscopic content. In terms of camera formats, you can work natively with the ALEXA, RED, Phantom, as well as QuickTime, DPX and Open EXR. With SpeedGrade’s new GPU-accelerated Lumetri Deep Color Engine, you can create a look for every scene with 32-bit floating-point accuracy with primary and secondary color adjustments, film-style filters, and effects. You can also de-Bayer RAW footage in real time, work with HDR footage and switch between log and linear color spaces.

SpeedGrade is a native 64-bit app that offers GPU-accelerated performance

Professional colorists can also conform EDLs or receive sequences from Premiere Pro. When your edit is done in Premiere Pro, you can easily send to SpeedGrade, which sets the project up as a 10-bit DPX sequence, creates a SpeedGrade .ircp file that includes a timeline and then opens the project in SpeedGrade.

Prelude

The line between production and post is becoming increasingly more transparent due to the emergence of file-based workflows. On a shoot, someone is usually charged (typically a camera assistant, or on a bigger budget, a D.I.T.) with getting the files off the camera, logging the footage and then delivering to post. Prelude – the newest program to CS6 – provides a smart new workflow interface for ingest and logging. Prelude simplifies this process by allowing you to ingest footage quicker, including the ability to duplicate, transcode and verify formats. With intuitive keyboard driven logging, you can also create metadata and subclips while you’re still viewing your clips. You can also create rough cuts by combining clips and subclips with markers and comments and then send to Premiere Pro CS6 for editing. If you’re working with an editor that you haven’t worked with before, you can also add comments in a clip to tell him or her what’s important in the shot and what to emphasize. Prelude will definitely save you valuable time in post and is a great new edition to an already loaded suite.

For more information, please visit www.adobe.com.