Adobe CS6 - Breaking News!

[SCAPsinger-PZKeOS]

Some members of the Adobe CS team(Dennis Radeke and 2 others - sorry, forgot their names, but they were PPro/AME team people) were in attendance at the Atlanta Cutters meeting last night. You'll all be happy to know that they revealed quite a bit about the next version - CS6. Here's the quickie info on CS6, I've quoted as carefully as I can:

- "It's coming in 2012"

- "It's going to be amazing"

- "It's pretty exciting"

I hope they don't get fired for revealing all of that info. I'm sure you all are very excited, as I was last night, to be able to gain such an early look at the next generation of video editing.

In all seriousness, they were very good at the one thing they were really there to do - convert FCP dissidents - and answered a few questions people had - again, mostly about migrating from FCP. Quite nice to hear my FCP friends talking afterward about how it's a done deal, Adobe is the here-and-now. All this in spite of the fact that Media Composer 6 is basically here now as well.

Sorry to get everybody all excited with the thread title...I really couldn't help myself. It was refreshing, though, to see not 1, not 2, but 3 reps from Adobe at a relatively small user group meeting in Atlanta (150 attendees, more or less) and this is after they've already been out here once this year. Says a lot about the development of the production community here in Atlanta for the last few years, but also says a lot about Adobe's committment to listening to their customers and working constantly to solve problems and develop new solutions that fit our various workflows. I still remember the old days where Premiere Pro was seemingly an unsupported piece of Adobe refuse, meant simply to fill a gap and keep people working with AE. Those days are as long-gone as they can be now, and the good times are rolling on.

[excited_Genie16B8]

Adobe announced the discontinuation of CS Review "on April 12th, 2012

Uh...where'd you see that?  My understanding was that it was free until then, being a paid service thereafter.

[SCAPsinger-PZKeOS]

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/cslive/faq.html

[excited_Genie16B8]

Well that is disappointing.  I used the service quite a bit, and found it the best method so far for client review and correction.

I wonder if the same holds true for Story, which was also suppose to be free until the 12th, being paid thereafter.

[SCAPsinger-PZKeOS]

Regarding Story, read the rest of the FAQ.

As for CS Review, so many of my clients complained about it. They didn't like creating accounts, they didn't like the slow playback, they didn't like the low quality, they found the controls unintuitive.

As for creating an account, that is a bit annoying. Simply asking them to use a password would be nice enough. The slow playback was an issue for my clients on fast connections (talking corporate lines, big city, "no expense spared" type stuff). As for being unintuitive...well, I never found that to be the case, but then I'm more tuned into this stuff than I would expect your average attorney or business owner or school teacher to be.

Anyway, the fact that it was free for CS Review was great, but the service itself was the source of complaints by my clients so rather than blow them off, I gave Adobe CS Review the pink slip. I have been doing my reviews on Vimeo Pro for a while now and it's much easier for my clients. There is a private review page and comment area and as soon as the client approves the final video online, I click a button and it goes live on the main site. Easy.

The one feature - the "killer app" - that CS Review had that held my interest the most was the integration to and from Premiere Pro. As far as I can tell, that worked fine (although recently - after having stopped my use of CS Review - I did notice that the CS Review tab in PPro caused issues at launch every time I opened a PPro project). But you know, Clip Notes had that feature before and both then and now (or then and then), the feature was almost unused because no matter how well I explained it to my clients, they just ended up making notes on a notepad as they watched the videos and then sending the edit notes to me in an e-mail.

The only time that feature really shined for me was when I had some editors collaborating on a piece. They easily understood how to use CS Review. So for those purposes it is great. That's just not what I was working with the other 90% of the time when the reviewer was the end client.

So while I'd agree with you Jim that it is disappointing news, it's only disappointing because it was a feature that sat there unusable for most of the time that I "owned" it. So I for one am looking forward to what Adobe brings along for the review space in Creative Cloud.

[excited_Genie16B8]

As long as it's integrated, and will jump to the same frame in a sequence that a comment is made on, I guess I won't complain.

(So basically, as long as it's CS Review+)

[SCAPsinger-PZKeOS]

I'm sure the idea is to steer folks to the new Creative Cloud service. Otherwise they'd have two similar concurrent services.

I never cared for CS Review as it was implemented...the Premiere Pro integration was great but the user experience for editors and clients left a lot to be desired once reviews were actually online.