New features in Premiere CS4
 

They look awesome! If they have fixed all (or at least some) those little annoyances and bad memory management, Premiere will be right on track with FCP, if not better.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4: Printable overview

If the program is stable, then it is one of the best updates ever.

I don`t hold my breath though... It`s like Pinnacle Studio - the higher the version, the less stable it is :(

CS2 was more stable than 1.5 though cs3 is a bit less stable than cs2 it was nowhere near 1.5. Just hope that they fix all the bugs in the current version.

Do you folks know when CS4 will be available?

Best,

According to the Adobe press release, GA is next month.

What I find interesting is that the information on their Web site does very little to quantify the new features/enhancements available in PP and the other products. The only things that jumped out at me was support for more video formats and a new UI.

After spending five minutes cruising thru the announcement material, this appears to be an evolutionary upgrade with most of the new functionality aimed at the high-end user. It addresses some of the existing shortcomings like lack of AVHCD support, but nothing that changes the world.

I'll have to go through the announcement materials tonight to be sure, but I'm not yet prepared to run out and spend US$599 to upgrade from CS3.

I sat thru the entire boring presentation, which was populated by a) Adobe employees b) the Adobe faithful

I saw very little of substance, nor can I find any list of upgrades. Other than the rather esoteric comment"...a complete re-write", and the mention of being supported by GPU's.

Considering the cost of Adobe products, I think I'll sit this one out, unless something more concrete shows up.

What do you think about the new version? I cant help thinking that PP looks like FCP. Come to think of it, it was designed by the same persons, wasn’t it?

With theses up grades will this be a contender to Avid and FCP in the market.

Nick

Ahh. A complete re-write. That could either be a very good thing or a very bad thing. As many PP users will attest, the legacy of bugs in the product and its relative difficulty in handling any MPEG media formats, particularly HDV, a re-write could increase the user workflow speed to a valuable degree. (Read: less time spent re-booting and waiting for MPEG files to conform and index.)

If CS4 continues the suite's reliance upon MainConcept codecs, it's unlikely that we'll see any appreciable video improvements. A separate inspection of the latest offerings from MC would be needed to see if there's any new good in there.

I'm not budgeting upgrade dollars now but I might get a large glass jar into which I can put pocket change just in case.

Here's an interesting side by side comparison chart showing CS3 and CS4...

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4: Upgrade

haha

In reviewing this, I really like how they have the following as a feature of CS4 but lacking in CS3.

"Sleek new application appearance - New"

How do you quantify that objectively? Do you suppose when they released CS3 they viewed that product on release as not having a sleek application appearance?

Just one of those things you have to find your way through to get to the meat of what you're really getting with this product.

Jon

I've gone through a lot of the material, and to me it looks like a great version. I'm really looking forward to using it. There are a lot of enhancements and upgrades, and if it all functions as they say, it'll be very much worth upgrading from CS3.

Looking forward to upgrade.

Preview Zoom Level (Focus in Avid), Track Sync Locks and making subclips from timeline are great new editing workflow improvements to already great editing tools in Premiere. I would really like if they got it right this time.

I'm SOO out...in fact, I'm switching to a MAC
 

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.

Doing micro edits...another words, 5-10 rapid cuts, each about a half a second or so long, is nearly impossible to have playback smoothly in HDV, rendered or not.

Case in point: for the past two days, I've been trying to render out a 12 minute sequence in HDV. 22650 frames, 297MB. After THREE 12 hour render sessions, Premiere REFUSES to complete the task...it hangs at about 90%.

I'm working on a super fast, trouble free PC. After Effects works flawlessly, Premiere is sucking me dry time wise.

Sorry Adobe, I REALLY want to use your software...it's just too buggy and too time consuming for me to deal with.