Questions about CS4

[James Hooey]

Hi,

I've been playing around with After Effects CS3 and Photoshop CS3 trial demos for a little bit in expectation for my preorder of CS4 to ship out.

I've always used Vegas for editing and effects in the past and like it and have become quite capable over the past 4 years with various versions of it. I considered broadening my toolset/skillset looking for the capability to creat After Effects projects for stock media sales and to include several of the other software included in the Production Suite such as Photoshop CS3 extended, Illustrator, On Location and of course Premier.

What I am wondering is if anyone (considering beta testers here for a response) have used Premier, On Location and After Effects with an XHA1 in all it's record modes of 60i, 30f and 24f for capture and editing. It's not a major concern for me for capturing as Vegas 7 and now Pro 8c both handle capture of all of the Canons formats, but I wonder if the Adobe products will have any niggles with Cannons footage?

As well I am curious as to how good of build the new CS4 suite seems to be in terms of stability and good coding for performance? The trials I am learning on for the CS3 products seem pretty stable but mabey just a tad sluggish compared to Vegas...although my guess is there is a little more going on under the hood in Adobe products.

I'm running a Quad AMD 2.2ghz, Gigabyte MB, 7800GT video card and 2 Gig of fast ram, with Windows XP. It's a pretty solid machine that I built and would really only consider a upgrade to be more ram (possibly 8 gig) with Vista 64bit OS to utilise the ram.

If anyone has any other insights as to the new release of CS4 in particular to After Effects, Premier, and On location I would love to hear about them.

All the best,
James

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by James Hooey

What I am wondering is if anyone (considering beta testers here for a response) have used Premier, On Location and After Effects with an XHA1 in all it's record modes of 60i, 30f and 24f for capture and editing. It's not a major concern for me for capturing as Vegas 7 and now Pro 8c both handle capture of all of the Canons formats, but I wonder if the Adobe products will have any niggles with Cannons footage?

I've used all three modes on my A1 and PP eats them all up in HD. I've only edited 60i in DV. They all work virtually the same in the timeline and there's nothing ropey with one mode over the other.

Originally Posted by James Hooey

As well I am curious as to how good of build the new CS4 suite seems to be in terms of stability and good coding for performance? The trials I am learning on for the CS3 products seem pretty stable but mabey just a tad sluggish compared to Vegas...although my guess is there is a little more going on under the hood in Adobe products.

It's been reported that PP CS4 is a re-write but that doesn't make sense to me. If they were going to re-write the app, why not make it 64-bit? It's not, so my guess is that they've just cooked the UI. As I recollect, PP CS4 is supported under Vista 64, but that doesn't imply that it's been re-written. They probably just included Vista 64 in the testing regimen.

Don't assume that there's more cooking inside with PP than Vegas. Vegas is a much newer product. Premier has been around since the early 1990s. How much early version code still lives inside the beast? No way of knowing. All I know is that PP's move into HDV was less than stellar. The way it handles HDV could be better, but never having used Vegas I cannot make a comparison.

Originally Posted by James Hooey

I'm running a Quad AMD 2.2ghz, Gigabyte MB, 7800GT video card and 2 Gig of fast ram, with Windows XP. It's a pretty solid machine that I built and would really only consider a upgrade to be more ram (possibly 8 gig) with Vista 64bit OS to utilise the ram.

I have a Q6600 2.3 gHz with 4GB of Ram and it chirps along pretty well. You will want more RAM. Vista 64 and 8 gig will let you more easily switch between PP, AE and Photoshop, which I find myself doing fairly regularly. I'm running Vista 32 and it functions well enough for me. I regularly do four hour DV projects without issue. Projects that large in HDV (60i) tend to want to fall over once you get to the color correcting and multi-cam editing stages, but there are workarounds.

Hope that helps.

[James Hooey]

Thanks for the info Tripp, much appreciated!

Just to confirm, is this CS4 you are speaking about?

[Blake Raidal]

It's not 64bit!!! What the hell man, Adobe really have to catch up.
I use XH-A1 footage all the time on 2hr plus timelines, it works fine. Only SD 50i and 25p footage though, I don't do allot of HD.

Honestly I think running a professional suite on 32bit is a joke, I blame Matrox for this making there cards ONLY 32bit compliant. I long for the day when I can use PP and AE with a 16GB, 8 core workstation.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by James Hooey

Just to confirm, is this CS4 you are speaking about?

Nope. CS3 thus far, but I'm awaiting GA so I can try 4. Print descriptions fall far short of convincing me to shell out the cash for it.

[James Hooey]

Well...no worries about if it's worth the upgrade from CS3 here....I only have the trials. CS4 Production Suite will be my first purchased foray into another line of software for me. (Vegas user since 4.0) The suite package is good if you consider the costs of each piece of software seperately, but it's still gonna be slightly over $2000.00 shipped/customs to get it to me here in Canada when all is said and done.

Blake..
As for 64 bit....not too overly concerned. As I understand it each open application instance can utilise up to 4 gigs ram so whenever I finally switch over to a 64 bit OS, I think that will handle most of my demands. With a 16 gig ram system I suppose for example I could dedicate 4 gig to Premier, 4 gig to AE, and 4 gig to Photoshop with 4 gig left over for system needs and get pretty darn good performance swapping project elements through Adobe bridge.

I'm sure there would also be some speed increase with a truely 64bit app but with background rendering and generally fast processors I think it will be a pretty painless situation....I would hate to have to update/upgrade my plugins and other apps simply to exist on a all 64bit system.

Thanks again to everyone. I hope someone with CS4 beta use can shed some direct light on my first post as that is the version I have put the money down on!

All the best.