I think “Game Changer” is an over used cliche but her we go again, and Im not talking Facebook hype either. I’ve been using Premier Pro CS6 on a MAC for about ten hours and already I can see that this will now be my goto editing software. This is going to hit the FCX community hard and a lot great editors will fall back into the Adobe Premier fold I predict.

Is it my imagination or has the interface become simpler and more intuitive and yet, more powerful. Plus, it just does what I want it to and FAST FAST on a Cuda Nvidia Card. Adobe has scored huge with the speed improvements (Mercury Playback Engine) on this rewrite of Adobe Premier. Ive heard there are more than 50 changes made on this version.

A couple things I love about the new Premier:

I initially moved to FCPX from Premier because of ProRes. Although Adobe has been touting the ease of mixing different HD formats on right on their timeline, the program still has to render effects and transitions to some format and that use to be slower in Premier than in FCX. Todays Premier seems much faster and I can say today that if and editor is regularly using multiple sources of HD as I do–Nikon HDSLR, Xacti, GoPro, and Hacked Lumix GH2 codecs–than there is so much time saved by not conforming all the formats to PRORES before editing. This alone is a great reason to switch now that Premier is FAST.

The Workspace layout with source, program sequence and SCRUBBABLE thumbnails in the project window is to me, the most intuitive and useful layout yet. I am a sucker for those FCPX scrubbable thumbnails so I can edit lots of real estate quickly right from the project window. Way more useful than logging and labeling before editing. I like fast editing. Plus there is a new way to color code audio and clips on the timeline. Included in the Suite is a new program called Prelude which allows you to pre-edit clips and put color bars over areas of interest on the clip like “favorites” in FCPX.

The second most important change is the superior way Premier handles multi cam editing. I like to record fishing and sports with multiple cameras. In one of the last version upgrade on FCX, apple tried to sneak in the Multicam Editing Feature and all I can say is YUCK. Premier has multi cam down in this version. And, best of all, I can use different formats in the multi cam. There is also a way to Merge clips in a better way than FCP. Merging clips allows you to use good audio and sync to good video.

Another awesome feature that use to be lacking in Premier was the ability to Warp and Stabilize within the timeline (a Distort Video Effect). It works pretty good on those shaky shots. Also, you can conform 60fps right in the timeline to get some pretty decent “cooked” slow motion without having to first conform the the 60fps with Cinema Tools (Clip-Modify-Interpret Footage). Also added–Rolling Shutter Removal.

Now you can modify and manipulate multiple clips on the timeline using Adjustment Layers. No more cutting and pasting attributes from one clip to a bunch of other clips one at a time.

Im sure the next months will bring more happiness as I dig deeper. Ive already deleted CS5.1 from my macbook air. WHen GoPro decides to release there Wi-Fi back now two months delayed, Im going to be in multicam heaven–the mounts in and around the new boat are waiting….

For a different post but still worth mentioning, Photoshop CS6 is also very nice with lots of new stuff. I like the lens correction features and much better tools to erase things while preserving background. Also, Lightroom 4.0 is a marked improvement over Lightroom 3.