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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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