Adobe has announced the released of CS6, which will be officially out within in 30 days. You can still buy outright, but it does seem that cloud makes more sense.
The prices can be seen on the product comparison page. Even the Master collection, which is a $549 upgrade or $2599 full seems a better deal in the cloud, as a $30 a month initial deal with a year subscription makes it much cheaper, and you already know you will get a new version every year.
You can now officially pre-order Adobe Creative cloud. It is $70 month by month or $50 a year, and will supposedly have a $30 a month special offer for people who own a creative suite, production bundle or the Master Collection, though that part of the site doesn’t quite work as of yet. And it will be out within a month, though will continue to evolve over it’s life and has additions that even the Master Collection doesn’t have live Device and PC Sync, Cloud Storage, Business Catalyst, Typekit, Story plus, Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge.
That and the ability to get Beta version of their software when new features will be released, and have access to every app (though Lightroom will take longer to join the cloud for some strange reason)makes this the way to go for Creative Suite users.
You can see their product comparison to see what comes in which version of the suite.
Tim Siglin at Streaming Media has a good review of the Adobe Prelude. Check it out. Sounds like a great addition to the Production Bundle.
Check out the videos showing off the new features. I so can’t wait to give CS6 a test drive!
Chris and Tish Meyer have an After Effects CS6 Review.
•Ray-Traced 3D Rendering Engine sounds great, but very also limited at this point. And it only works with CUDA cards not the few AMD Laptop cards approved for Premiere Pro.
•3D Camera Tracker is covered. It sounds pretty automated, but I am very excited to have Shadow Catcher layers, a white solid which only receives shadows. It basically sounds very good, but not as good as the Foundry’s excellent CameraTracker which has more options.
•Track in Mocha is a new feature that allows you to send files to Mocha instead of having to import files yourself. A feature that will make Mocha a more integrated tracker.
•Rolling Shutter Repair that removes Jello Cam from CMOS DSLR.
•Variable Mask Feathering is a feature I have been missing since Shake, and I am glad as hell to see it in After Effects. To do it you just Option drag on a mask point.
•Global Performance Cache where RAM Previews are retained in memory to save re-renders.
•Persistent Disk Cache all RAM Cache’s are saved to disk with projects, and you can Cache work area in background.
•Faster Graphics Pipeline is an update to how OpenGL is handled (which is how some AMD cards are supported). And NVIDIA cards are 150-250% faster and possibly 16 times faster, but mostly under windows.
Also
•Automatic Duck Pro Import After Effects is included
•CycloreFX HD is now bundled
•Drop Shadow, Spill Supressor, Timewarp, Transform, Set Matte, Photo Filter, Fill and Linear, Iris, Radial Wipe Transitions have been updated for 32 Bit.
•Apply Color LUT supports CineSpace,, Irrisad and Speedgrade files.
•Arriraw can be imported
•MXF OPIa video codecs can be exported
•Render only machines don’t need serial numbers
•Many Scripting additions have been added.
Things that were removed.
•Photoshop Live 3D layers are no longer supported.
•FreeForm AE is no longer bundled.
•Custom Pixel Bender effects are no longer supported
•CS6 can only save to CS5.5 no but CS5
PVC has an article by Scott Simmons on his top 5 Premiere Pro CS6 Features.
1) Better Broadcast Monitoring
2) Hover Scrub over clips
3) Trimming
4) Cleaner Interface
5) Effects Improvements: Adjustment Layers and Warp Stabilzer
I so can’t wait to get my hands on this!