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Opinions from switchers of CS5.5 to CS6?
  • I'm guessing quite a few folks have experience here with CS5.5 and CS6.

    I recently found someone to sell me the entire CS5.5 master collection for just under $100 (they are legitimate and it's not pirated). But.... I'm also a student and can get the CS6 production premium for around $450 (or so). The upgrade costs to CS5.5 to CS6 seem like they are almost as much as the CS6 student pricing.. so... I'm wondering if the new features (esecially in premiere cs6) are worth the extra money???

    What is your personal view about cs6 vs cs5.5? :-)

  • 12 Replies sorted by
  • Consider subscribing to the creative cloud. You get everything for $30 per month for the first year as an upgrade and $50/month otherwise. You get many more applications and can use them on 2 workstations. They can be different platforms so you can work on both Windows and Mac.

  • Using anything before CS6 makes me want to pull my hair out. Not that CS5.5 was so much worse, but it's impossible to think about going back now. For me, the updates to the Premiere interface, the performance boosts through Mercury/CUDA, timeline adjustment layers, the never-stop playback and the full-screen toggle make it indispensable.

  • Theirs actually student pricing for the Cloud and it's $20 a month. I'm assuming 6.5 would come out before the year contract is over so basically you'd be able to upgrade to 6.5 when the time comes and still pay the same.

  • Yeah - the Creative Cloud from Adobe is good deal, particularly if you use many Adobe applications (you get 15-20 different applications). I'm on it, and you get a ton of stuff including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and much more. You can check at www.adobe.com/CreativeCloud

  • Thanks all... I found a solution ;-) ...Vitaliy, please feel free to close this thread or merge with the CS6 if you like....

  • There is one drawback on AE CS6: You loose support for pixel bender plugins. And there is quite a some nice free around.

  • Functionally, CS6 really does nothing better except multicam. There are a few bugs it has that 5.5 does not have. Neither version does pulldown, you need after effects or Cineform, etc. If you are not shooting interlaced it does not matter. Scrubbing is a pain in 6. You do get Speedgrade with some versions, which is a powerful tool that I never use because it crashes, seriously crashes, and does not interface with Premiere. So I think 5.5 is OK for most things. If you have six cams and want to use multicam, that is certainly one important feature.

  • Premiere CS6 has the wrap stabilizer so you don't have to use After Effects and from what I've seen online, After Effects CS6 is more efficient.

    Still, I'm almost in the same boat. I have an even older model, CS5 and it's doing what I need although I do wish I had the wrap stabilizer.

  • That's right--I haven't even tried the warp stabilizer, but there are third party plugins if you need them. That's a good new feature. I don't see any big speed improvements. I'm happy with 6, but I'm disappointed that the differences are small. The color correction is somewhat improved if you want to dive into the three way color corrector.

  • A very useful part od CS6 is Prelude, for preparing projects with lots of clips and lots of editorial to evaluate.

  • The improved disk cache and global cache are nice features in AE CS6, although I don't think that they alone are worth the upgrade price.

  • I use After Effects CS5.5 on a dual-monitor system to grade and preprocess my source footage before importing it into Premiere CS5.5. I've found Color Finesse 3 suits my style and have been thinking about trying out the Tangent Wave controller:

    http://www.tangentdevices.co.uk/products_wave.asp

    Since I don't need AE effects in Premiere and I'm not really sold on switching to Speedgrade, I haven't yet seen a compelling reason to upgrade to CS6. The following article has links to Adobe's feature-by-feature comparison charts:

    http://prodesigntools.com/compare-versions-differences-between-adobe-cs6-vs-cs5-5.html