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CS6 first impressions

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CS6 first impressions

Postby jackfalbey » Sat May 26, 2012 1:31 am

Well, I went ahead and tried the 30-day free trial of Adobe CS6 Creative Cloud. For those of you who aren't familiar with Creative Cloud, if you are a licensed owner of any CS3 or higher suite you are eligible to download and install ALL of the CS6 Master Collection programs for only $29.99/mo (standard price is $49.99/mo). That's right, instead of paying the $1000-$1500 upgrade price for the boxed set of software, you can have it all for $30 bucks a month! Excellent move, Adobe! I installed it on the PC in my signature below, which is good but certainly not state-of-the-art by any means. And for reference, I'm moving up from Production CS4 and Design CS3.

Now, for my initial impressions:

It's fast! Not only do the programs launch much faster, they PERFORM faster! In InDesign CS3, I would have to wait a while for effects to preview onscreen, especially drop-shadows. Now, it's almost instant. Same with Photoshop filters & effects.

With Premiere CS4 I had to convert my AVCHD to Cineform AVI to have anything resembling a decent editing experience. Premiere CS6 takes the 44Mbit AVCHD from my hacked GH2 natively on the timeline and runs it as smoothly as DV on my old Pentium 4! I can only imagine how fast it would be if I had an Nvidia CUDA card for the Mercury Playback Engine to use. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with some Cineform AVIs, because I love Cineform's First Light app which is like Lightroom for video.

Integration between programs is almost seamless in CS6. Last night I had Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Bridge all open simultaneously while working on a logo/business card/webpage header and moving between them was a dream! I didn't have to wait for a change in one to update in the others. I also had Premiere open so I could play around with some video files while brainstorming the design stuff. With CS3 & CS4 this would have bogged down my PC (if not crashed it!) but CS6 ran as smooth as glass on the very same hardware.

The various programs have also been revamped visually to present a more unified appearance, which makes it easier to transition between them.

It's only been a few days, and I've barely scratched the surface, but I'd highly recommend checking out the 30-day free trial. If you held off upgrading to CS5 or CS5.5, I think now is the time to move up. Adobe finally got their coding right for a 64-bit environment, and CS6 happily takes advantage of everything your PC's hardware has to offer.
ASRock Z77 Pro4, Xeon E3-1230 V2, Windows 7 64-bit, 32GB RAM, 3GB GTX 660 ti, 240GB SSD for OS/programs, 3x640GB in RAID0 for projects
Panasonic GH2; Adobe Creative Cloud
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby Briantho » Sat May 26, 2012 3:38 am

Great to read your impressions Jack. I've been VERY happy with Premiere Pro 5.5 over the last 10 months and I've done a lot of multi camcorder work of shows, plays, etc using 4 sometimes 5 camcorders. Premiere Pro has been SO much easier than Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express (which I used for the previous couple of years) and one of the BIG advantages that the Adobe products have is that they work (brilliantly) on either Mac or PC so you can switch either way any time and hardly miss a beat!

I did read elsewhere of some problems with AVCHD so it was interesting that you're OK in that area. I also read that the new stabilization feature (only existed in After Effects before) is giving significant project bloat but I'm sure they'll fix that quickly. In any case, this 55 second video shows what I've been using in that area for the last few months: vimeo.com/36423669

I'm definitely going to upgrade but, as usual, I think I'll wait till CS6.1.1.1 comes out.... :-)
24" iMac. 17" MBP. FCPX and a little bit of Premiere Pro. Nine recent Panasonic HD camcorders. Many (but never enough) terabytes of external storage...
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby Steve Grisetti » Sat May 26, 2012 9:30 am

Thanks for the great review, Jack!
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby cincinedit » Mon May 28, 2012 4:39 pm

I am also very interested in trying the Adobe Cloud software. For me a long time PE users (started with 2) I have always been nervous to spend the money to upgrade to Premiere Pro. This cloud purchase options sound like it might be a way for me to try out the software and see if it works for me. I know you can usually download trial versions but somehow I always have issues with those.

The main reason for my upgrading to pro it the ability to use different type of video material without having to convert everything. Trying to find all the right settings for PE 10 drives me crazy.
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby Clayton » Wed May 30, 2012 1:59 pm

Jack, how does it work if a new version comes out and you are paying monthly. Do you automatically get the latest version?
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby Bob » Wed May 30, 2012 4:06 pm

You can download and install new version as they become available. Remember, the $29.99 is a one year introductory price for registered owners of qualifying Adobe products. After that, it will revert to the standard price of $49.99. Also, there is no path for converting back to the perpetual license. If you discontinue the subscription you can continue to use your original qualifying version, but you will have to buy an upgrade if you want the then current version.
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Re: CS6 first impressions

Postby Clayton » Thu May 31, 2012 12:04 pm

Except for the first year, it would be cheaper to upgrade my creative suite every 2 years (about $750) compared to $600 a year for a subscription. I realize you get everything in the subscription but I don't need more than the creative suite. :-8
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