With CS6, Adobe Tidies up Premiere Pro, Speeds up After Effects

Quick access to software features is nice, but there can be too much of a good thing. That's what Adobe concluded when designing Premiere Pro CS6, the upcoming version of its video-editing software. Adobe was pleased with the current CS5's Mercury Playback Engine, which on computers with higher-end Nvidia graphics cards provides a major hardware acceleration boost for some tasks. But the user interface was too cluttered, said Premiere Pro Product Manager Al Mooney.

A cleaner user interface is timely. Adobe is competing fiercely to win over video editors disaffected by changes in Apple's Final Cut Pro X. But Apple has been shoring up weaknesses in its software, making it harder to get the derisive "iMovie Pro" label to stick, and the company has a lot of clout when it comes to building spartan but useful user interfaces. Adobe also has a major performance change coming with After Effects, a separate package for video-processing tasks such as changing colors and contrast and adding moving text. AE now can store rendered frames of video in a memory or disk cache so that adding new effects is a smaller incremental change. Adobe believes this will liberate those who want to experiment with different looks for a video.