the transribe function (voice recognition ) works amazingly well.feed your dialog in and get searchable timecode text back. You can even click on a word and I'd will move you to the spot in the video. That alone is worth he upgrade.

Then there is metadata. Tc and reel data work in ae

Dynamic link is better then ever

Lots of good basic improvments in editng functionality

Stabilty improvements too

The UI is much tighter. The info window now displays the tc of all clips under the cgi in the TL.
So before you knock it, try it.

I agree with not being able view HDV files during capture. That sucks. But, I have never had it hang up when rendering HDV files of any length. A colleague stresses saving my work often but I have gone hours without manually saving. I did manage to screw up one HDV capture when I accidentally hit the sleep button instead of the esc button. It didn't like that at all. So far, I haven't had any issue with quick tempo cuts, either. I have CS3 on 2 computors. My old tried and true computor is a older Sony Viao with HT. 4mb of ram and 2 internal drives, totaling 500 gig. Running on XP (SP 3). My newer computor is a Gateway quad core with 4 mb of ram and the standard internal 500 gig HD. It is running on Vista. I haven't done much with it yet. I have a 1TB drive waiting to go in and I am going to get 4 more MB of ram. I guess I have been lucky but CS3 works pretty well for me. Better than another friends FCS on his hot rod ($$$) Mac.

I have lots of questions for anybody that has had a chance to play with PPro CS4.

I'd like to hear more about the dynamic link functionality. I read that Premiere pro sequences are now dynamically linked to AE. So you can make an edit to a premiere pro sequence and then switch to AE and that sequence gets auto updated inside AE too.

Does that mean that the PPro sequence is a single clip on the AE timeline? Or are all of it's layers individually editable in a (dynamically linked) comp? If it's the latter then that feature alone is enough for me to want to upgrade. I'd like to see it in action.

Metadata sounds like a good step too. I hope that by CS5 you'll have the ability to move an asset (in bridge) and any CS program that is using that asset will have it's link changed to reflect the new location. That would be very powerful.

What about Soundbooth workflow? Can you copy your audio timeline clips and paste them into a Soundbooth multi-track session? Do you still have to click on each audio clip in the timeline and "Render for Soundbooth" or is there a faster method? Can you preview a PPro sequence's video in the video window of a multi-track session?

How about markers? Can you copy and paste sequence markers, or black video clips containing markers, between PPro and soundbooth?

Was avcHD editing smooth?

Can't wait to hear about the details.

I have similar experience with freezing during rendering, though in my case, it doesn't matter how long the footage is. Longer the worser, I guess. I was exporting 1.5 hrs wedding long edit to quicktime and it took me 5 trys because it kept hanging at 90%.

JJ

Craig - How do you know that they didn't fix any of those problems - do you have a copy of CS4?

Check it out chuncky! http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1555v1713

There was somewhere a Russian website with details on some interesting new features of CS4 that were not really mentioned in the upgrade. Anyone care to dig up the link? I wonder if what they wrote there is in the new version, because there were many fixes for little annoying things :)

The feature comparison is interesting. There is some interesting content and that's critical as features sell products. But for all us poor yabos, let's hope the rewrite fixed the bloody bugs rather than introduced new ones.

I will watch and wait to be convinced.

Has anyone here actually worked with final release of PPro CS4?

GA isn't until next month and I would expect that they're still regression testing and fixing bugs so the "final" version likely won't be available to anyone until at least a fortnight before the general release date.

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

To answer some of my own questions from my previous post, after watching the videos on adobe tv:

1) It looks like you can import a PPro sequence into SB for use as a video reference. So once you have exported all your audio assets from PPro, and imported them into and SB multitrack file (the process of which I still dont know), you can edit your entire audio mix in SB whilst watching a dynamically linked PPro reference video. This is what I've been wating for.

2) PPro sequences are dynamically linked into AE in both directions! So you can adjust your edit in PPro at any time and then the changes will be reflected in AE when you go back to it. It seems that the PPro sequence gets imported as a single clip into AE, so if you need to be able to manipulate different clips on a PPro timeline independantly, you'll have to select them all in PPro and "Render to an AE comp" (another new feature of CS4) and then edit them all as separate layers (but live without them being dynamically linked to the orignal PPro sequence).
Another possibility, if you have a lot of clips that need the same work to them done in AE, but still need to edit some other clips separately, would be to edit each group of clips in their own sequence in PPro and then nest all the sequences into a master sequence and import the master sequence as a dynamically linked sequence into AE.

I've been waiting for this functionality for so long too.

3) Regarding markers, there was nothing mentioned about them in any of the videos, but given the features I've just described, I can almost envisage working without them completely.

I can't wait to get hold of a copy and start playing.

ouuuh... batch encoding, bulk effect controls.. the little things that limit this program are getting sorted out! This upgrade is extensive and badly needed, cant wait to get my hands on it.
Finally I can use blend modes & copy and paste transitions. If its 64bit compatible and Supports GPU acceleration Ill be truly smitten.

Got it on order.... they show a ship date of mid October...

Many of the new features seem interesting and even useful, but if the legendary stability and memory issues aren't addressed they're meaningless. I think all software engineers are enthralled by new features, but we don't really need more features -- what we need is a more stable and reliable tool.

A look at nearly every other software forum both here and at other websites seems to show that while users of other packages have the most issues about what their NLE can't/won't do, a significant portion of Premiere posters have stability and/or memory issues. But virtually no one complains about lack of features in Premiere.

Of concern is that even though CS4 is certified to work under Vista 64, it still isn't a 64 bit app, which I presume means it still can't use more than 2 gigs of RAM (someone please correct me here). So my anticipated OS and RAM upgrade will possibly be for naught. Or will it?

I hope the claims are right about bugs being identified and fixed and stability being enhanced. I'll look forward to reviews by the early adopters, and while I know that in a perfect world we shouldn't have to pay the upgrade ransom just to get the package to work properly, I'm perfectly willing to do so. And I say this as a big Premiere fan.