New features in Premiere CS4

[Todd Clark]

Originally Posted by Craig Lieberman

What a lame upgrade. They didn't fix any of the main issues:
Can't view HDV files during capturing footage;
PP CS3 hangs up/freezes at 99.98% when rendering any HDV files longer than about 4 minutes;
Hitting the "Cancel" button during any rendering process can take anywhere from 1 minute to never to have the render actually cancel;
When there is a serious error, your work is gone....history, lost. I can't tell you how many hours I've lost on this.

How do you know this? Have you seen information regaurding this? I cannot find anything regaurding enhancments.

[Steve Oakley]

Originally Posted by Jiri Fiala

I don`t get how anyone can comment on stability from beta version.

how can you assume beta = unstable ? not all bugs / problems are crashers. so commenting that the app has better stability in beta should be taken as a good thing.

[Richard Wakefield]

please someone, anyone, tell me that CS4 will allow HD scene split?!!!!

[Jiri Fiala]

Originally Posted by Steve Oakley

how can you assume beta = unstable ? not all bugs / problems are crashers. so commenting that the app has better stability in beta should be taken as a good thing.

If you`re a beta tester or have had a chance to play with it, good. Otherwise it`s just guessing and FUD.

[Kevin Janisch]

If Adobe history has taught me anything, it has taught me an Adobe software upgrade necessitates a hardware upgrade, and in many cases this is doing the exact same work/projects. I still have CS3 Production Premium sitting in it's box uninstalled because Premiere Pro CS3 was a complete dog and even more unstable than Premiere Pro 2. I thought the point of an "upgrade" was for the software to be better, more efficient, more stable, etc. I'm at a point where what I have works and can't and won't invest in the time to troubleshoot and tweak my system and software to achieve the same end result. I'm currently using Vegas 8 and love it, although it took some time to migrate after using Premiere since version 4. In less than 8 months with Vegas my mindset has changed from "I hope this works", "Or I hope it doesn't crash" or "I hope I don't have to troubleshoot errors" to just plain focusing on producing and it is a complete shift. I can spend more time being creative than being technical. To me, the time investment and paradigm shift has been worth the peace of mind in stability and performance. I still use CS2 Photoshop, Audition, Encore, and After Effects, these are great products. Products that allow me to work. Premiere CS3 and CS2 with HDV just created more work for me, and not the type I want to be doing. Until Adobe can reinvent Premiere once again, like they did with Premiere Pro 1 from 6.5, I won't even consider it, and by then it might not matter anyways.

[Paul Kepen]

I still have the old PPro 1.5. It seems to work realatively well with HDV using Cineform. Are all the bad HDV experiences everyone is having on CS3 with Cineform HDV files, or using native HDV?

I mostly use Sony Vegas. I had version 6 for several years and it worked very well. Vegas is extremely stable, however render times with Vegas 6 are slow compared to PPro 1.5. It took awhile to get use to the Vegas workflow, but I find it to be substantially quicker to edit with then PPro. However, even though I've calibrated my monitor, what you see is Not always what you get with Vegas. I've upgraded to Vegas 8, which renders faster, but I'm having other issues with the new 8bit versus 32 bit floating point features. Using HDV files captured with Cineform Prospect and Vegas project settings at 8 bit, the image was dark with blown out highlights. Using the 32bit project setting took care of the darkness, but the highlights are still blown out. Using recommendations from the Vegas forum (convert from computer RGB to Studio RGB) helps, but still does not totally fix the blown out highlights, and can make some of the darker scenes too dark. The same clips in PPro 1.5 render out perfect without any tinkering.
So in a nut shell, neither of these NLE's are all they're cracked up to be. Is it worth it to switch to Avid or FCP? If one of these truly worked all the time as they are suppose to, I would invest the time and money to switch. However, looking at the FCP forum, it seems they have their issues as well. If anyone has switched out of Premier or Vegas and found something that is substantially better, please give us some input. Thanks - PK

[Jiri Fiala]

Don`t switch to Avid if you do shorter-term projects and/or work alone or in small team. Avid is the BEST for huge projects with cuts only, like feature movies or long documentaries with heaps of footage. It`s full of tiny little features that make jobs like that easy. But if you need more versatile tool and produce corporate, event videography or web video, stay with Premiere/FCP/Vegas.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Kevin Janisch

Until Adobe can reinvent Premiere once again, like they did with Premiere Pro 1 from 6.5, I won't even consider it, and by then it might not matter anyways.

This is why I'm encouraged by the report that PP CS4 is a rewrite. Adobe can write good software (PS, AI, AE). They can write bad software (Bridge). And they can write stupid software (SoundBooth). I'm hoping that PP CS4 falls into the first category.

However, I'm not going to be anywhere close to the front of the line to trust my business to an X.0 software release. Mamma drowned all the dumb babies.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Paul Kepen

I still have the old PPro 1.5. It seems to work realatively well with HDV using Cineform. Are all the bad HDV experiences everyone is having on CS3 with Cineform HDV files, or using native HDV?

PK... It seems I've made it my life's work to get PP to work. Well, at least lately. I don't think that HDV in PP creates a ton of unique problems although I think the additional burden HDV puts on the system exacerbates problems that would come up with DV footage too. Many report happy days with PP CS3 and HDV. I found that Cineform creates its own problems. Not necessarily more than it solves but there are issues.

As a sidebar what makes Cineform a totally useless product is that it throw away anything above 100 IRE. When shooting in the wild like I do, you can't always get the exposure perfect. I like the fact that dumb-ole HDV will let me save the information up to 105 IRE and bring it back to the legal realm.

My point is that there are no silver bullets here. If what you got works but you got niggles. Work on the niggles.

[Denny Kyser]

Looks like on their website you can upgrade now, it this true, or isn't it ready yet.

[Stephen Armour]

Looks like someone something we don't. They said one very very big PRO feature, is that it not only runs on 64bit VISTA, but allocates 4 GB RAM to EACH program running under it while doing that.

If that is true, it would be a very big deal indeed. Especially in a production environment.

Some of the other updates are pretty heavyweight too, like to Dynamic Link, full blending modes and 3D enhancements.

Don't write this one off too soon, you may have to swallow your criticisms later, PLUS pay the extra $200 for the update after the end of Feb!

I'm certainly no Adobe evangelist, but this one looks pretty serious and I've been doing this video update dance for a long time. We'll cough up $$ for one of our 64bit systems to try it, just so we keep our irons hot and still in the fire.

Hopefully we'll see that money well spent. You can bet we'll update the other systems if there's real gain for that $$ pain.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Tripp Woelfel

...As a sidebar what makes Cineform a totally useless product is that it throw away anything above 100 IRE. When shooting in the wild like I do, you can't always get the exposure perfect. I like the fact that dumb-ole HDV will let me save the information up to 105 IRE and bring it back to the legal realm.

Tripp, just wondering why you said CF bit padding to 10bit from your HDV's 8 bit throws away info above 100 IRE? Do you know that for a fact?

Seems to me we've had to pull down to 100 IRE from our V1 tapes at times when CF'ing from tape (up to 1920x1080p).

[Mike Browning]

Waiting on working-world reviews first. My work is HDV heavy so I need to know if it's more reliable than CS3. Here's hoping, because I love the Adobe workflow, and I especially love it being available on the Mac. There are just so many hoops you have to go through now (but hey, at least there aren't as many hoops as Media Composer).

[Noa Put]

Regarding reliability, I have had major problems with the first patches that came out for premiere cs3 and i only could get it to work without a crash with a standard install, once I applied a patch I experienced one crash after the other with everything I did since the last autosave dissapeared. Only the latest patch they have made available seems to do the trick, since then (knock on wood) no crashes anymore. Also encore cs3 has handled all my projects (not blu-ray) without a problem.
So I don't see a reason to upgrade now.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

Tripp, just wondering why you said CF bit padding to 10bit from your HDV's 8 bit throws away info above 100 IRE? Do you know that for a fact?

Seems to me we've had to pull down to 100 IRE from our V1 tapes at times when CF'ing from tape (up to 1920x1080p).

Stephen... I was using Aspect and maybe I had something set up wrong. Yes, I know this for a fact because I viewed the files' waveforms in a CF project when color correcting it and there was nothing above 100 IRE. Perhaps you're using Prospect?