CS5 Users, how is it?
 

Hello,

I am an Edius user as well as a Creative Suite 4 user and am wondering how the recent upgraders feel about the new release from Adobe?

Is Encore any better for Blu-ray & DVD creation from the same project?

Is After Effects much improved and do the new tools work as they state?

Does the Mercury playback engine live up to its billing?

Have you played with Photoshop's new 3D extrusion tool?

Looks like a great suite as long as the users are happy after installing.

Thanks for your input.

I can't compare with Edius, but I'm VERY happy with CS5. Some folks seem to have particular issues that are often related to add-on software and plug ins...many, many threads with lots of info related to CS5 in this forum.

I've gone from CS3 to CS4 to CS5. On Windows 7 on an Intel i7 with 4GB RAM and no RAID setup it is pretty good. I don't have a good enough graphics card to take advantage of that side of things

Overall, I think it is faster. Rendering seems a lot faster than CS4 on my setup. I can at last add more RAM to my PC to make life even better, this was pointless with earlier versions.

I have had one crash, but that seems to be because of a corrupt .MTS file from a compact camera that I included on a timeline.

Thanks for your input. It looks like a great upgrade but I wanted to check and see if there have been any installation issues and if you felt like it was a worthwhile improvement (performance and feature wise) over the CS4 suite.

Overall I'd have to say it's been very good.

I think that the 'necessity' of a Quadro display card for pleasing performance is sometimes greatly overstated by those who haven't actually run the application, but have seen the marketing material.

These applications simply take a LOT of system resources (I'm a long-time user and that's just the fact), and just moving to 64 bit alone makes a world of difference.


...hey, Edius is a pretty great piece of software too. I don't think that PPro can make the claim that they quite approach the snap that Edius has (I'm not sure who can, actually), but it's pretty darn responsive and seems quite stable on my several-year-old dual-dual core AMD system with 8 GB RAM...(I do have a Quadro 4800 in it, though that has nothing to do with the stability.)

I've also recently run it on a quad core hyper-threaded i7 Vista 64 machine (OS technically not supported) with a 5800 Quadro, as well as a couple year old Mac with dual quad core Xeons and whatever general display card comes stock in that system...(no GPU boost) and it seems happy and solid on all systems so far.

I've been keeping up with both NLE's and I have to say that the MPE in CS5 is very much like Edius' playback capabilities. Add in the third party support, Dynamic Link with the other Adobe apps, and other assorted goodies you get with Premiere, and it's a no brainer for me.

As far as installation quirks, I think both companies are similar. In the past, however, I have had huge issues getting support for Edius though, sometimes waiting up to a week for a "call back" from their support engineers.

I have compared both CS4 and CS5. CS5, even in software-only mode, is a significant improvement in performance over CS4.

Thanks for your responses.

Just to clarify, I will be a lifelong Edius user and am not looking to switch. I am looking at getting the production premium CS5 suite which will have a lot of the programs.

My main focus will be After Effects, Photoshop and Encore. I thought Encore CS4 was a bit off as the preview window does not work properly for Blu-ray & DVD and motion menus need to be dynamicly linked from AE for Blu-ray to work.

Hopefully they focused on Blu-ray instead of adding more Flash output.

I use both Edius and CS5, The Adobe product works for me with RED, but Edius is faster, smoother, more stable, has more realtime ability without a fancy video card, has a far superior media exporter with more and varied options, much better slo mo, with a rigid and solid feeling interface.

Even with 64 bit, Adobe NLE products still make me feel "unsure" or slightly on edge - I love Edius' ability to save a project if you pull the plug on your PC! or it's incredibly simple "render to timeline" as well as "continue playback whilst editing" I could go on and on - but it does not support such a huge variety of plugins nor does it have such comprehensive audio facilities -

Oh well, just choose the platform that suits you best, or like me, use all of them for their best qualities.

Paul

Be aware that, if you're editing native progressive AVCHD files in any Adobe app, there is a chroma bug...

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...hroma-bug.html

Out of the new CS5 bundle I primarily use AE and it is SO much faster than CS4 it's ridiculous. Upgraded all my Trapcode plugins to the 64-bit versions and loaded a bunch on top of each other and where CS4 would grind to a halt, this almost plays real time. SICK!! Makes working on complex graphics much easier! It will take some time to get to all the new features as it's a rather deep program!

PS is also much faster and the content-aware tools are mind blowing.

Robert, this is good news. AE can be a real drag due to its out of real time working environment.

If Adobe could get some acceleration for AE playback we would all be doing back flips.

Which intermediate codec are you using with your HMC150 footage in AE?

I agree, AE CS5 is much faster most likely due to being 64 bit. With AE CS5, the more ram you have the better. Also, CS5 added Color Finesse 2 to AE and that is one helluva program for cc and grading. Recently, someone asked about the best color grading/correction program under $1k, and I told him AE CS5.

About the upgrade - its been horrible, absolutely horrible. Premiere CS5 is now so fast and easy to use that I want to edit more/get more work done. Also, it only takes anywhere from a 1/5th to a 1/10th of the time to encode video and I made the mistake of telling my client, and now he expects quicker turnarounds times from his review to my making changes and sending it back to him for review.

Thanks for your replies.

Anybody have an opinion about Encore CS5? Is it better/improved for Blu-ray/DVD than CS4?