Adobe previews CS6 Production Premium at NAB 2012

Previewed as part of Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium, After Effects CS6 and Premiere Pro CS6 are both packed with dozens of new features that promise to make both programs easier to use and more powerful than before.

After Effects CS6: key features

Like Photoshop CS6, the latest version of After Effects enables the program to use your computer's graphics hardware to speed up its performance and responsiveness and makes extensive use of RAM and persistent disk caching.

This trio of technologies - dubbed the Global Performance Cache - enables you to reuse elements and or play around with ideas in a scene without having to re-render the whole frame - making it more flexible and productive to use than before.

After Effects CS6 also includes a new 3D ray-tracing engine, which enables you to quickly and easily edit ray-traced text and shape layers, with support for reflections, refractions and other effects.

Also new to After Effects CS6 is the 3D Camera Tracker, which "automatically analyzes the motion present in normal 2D footage, extracts the position and lens type of the real camera that shot the scene, and creates a new 3D camera in After Effects to match," Adobe says. "It also overlays 3D track points onto the 2D footage, making it easy and intuitive for you to attach new 3D After Effects layers onto the original footage."

Other new features include Rolling Shutter Repair, Variable Mask Feathering and over 80 new and updated video effects, as well as improved mocha AE workflow.

Premiere Pro CS6: key features

Adobe is also using the launch of CS6 Production Premium to showcase a whole range of new features and enhancements to Premiere Pro CS6 at the 2012 NAB Show.

One of the biggest changes to Premiere Pro CS6 is a revised user interface that puts the Source Monitor and Program Monitor elements side-by-side at the top of the screen - literally putting video content front and centre of the program.

Seasoned users will now find that the Project panel, Media Browser and Effects panel have now been moved to the bottom left of the screen; while the Timeline and Audio Meters are now located bottom right.

Another major change in Premiere Pro CS6 is the GPU-accelerated Three-Way Colour Corrector, which makes it quicker and easier to apply colour corrections to your content. Adobe has also repositioned and exposed certain Colour Corrector interface elements - to help streamline your workflow.

Like other applications in Abobe Creative Suite 6, Premiere Pro also benefits from better hardware acceleration performance, thanks to improvements made by Adobe to the 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine: "Dynamically scalable, natively 64-bit, GPU-accelerated, and optimized for today’s lightning-fast multicore CPU, the enhanced Mercury Playback Engine delivers astounding performance, with or without a GPU," Adobe says.

CS6 Production Premium: the full monty

The new, improved version of After Effects and Premiere Pro join ten other Adobe applications that make up the rest of CS6 Production Premium. These are: Photoshop CS6 Extended, Audition CS6, SpeedGrade CS6, Prelude CS6, Illustrator CS6, Encore CS6, Flash Professional CS6, Media Encoder CS6, Story CS6 and Bridge CS6.