CS3 or CS4
 

I'm somewhat of a newbie to Premiere. Although I have CS5, I've been using CS4 due to the lack of plug-in options for CS5. I read somewhere that CS3 may be more stable than CS4. Can someone confirm that for me?

What kind of plugins were you looking for specifically?

Boris Red and Vitascene for starters. Boris should be coming soon.

I just recently upgraded to CS5 from CS4 and honestly even if all your plug-ins aren't available yet I think the upgrade is more than worth it. Much more stable and a dramatic gain in performance. I think plug-in vendors are scrambling to get on board with CS5 but many have already done so. I think the word is out that this is the version to get behind.

CS3 is ancient (well in computer terms) - very little point even considering it - even if you can find it available anywhere. I'd now hate to be without the more modern ones.

For me, CS3 was more stable than CS4, but I've found CS5 is better than both. Unless you are working only in DV formats, I see no reason to try to find a copy of CS3.

As for the plug-ins, CS5 comes with both CS4 and CS5 and allows them both to co-exist. I had them both on my desktop for a couple of weeks when CS5 was first released. I did my most of work in CS5. When I needed to finish with something that was not yet available for CS5 (in my case, it was SmartSound and the Mercalli stabilizer), I would just open the project in CS4 and do it there, render it out, save it and open it back up in CS5.

Thanks for the responses. I was using another NLE up until 2 months ago. I agree that CS5 is much faster and I purchased a new computer just for this reason. I have grown accustomed to using Boris and Vitascene though, mainly for the Luma and light transitions. Anyway, I have the Master collection for all three so that's not a problem. What prompted this post was I was having some issues with PP CS4. Someone said that CS3 was better but thought I could get some advice before I loaded it on the system. Believe me, I can't wait to start using CS5 but I just need to wait until at least Boris is ready. Unfortunately, I still have projects that need to be completed.

Yeah Rob, i jumped from CS2 to CS4....

Within every revision, there's great new features, and missing handy old features..
But from my understanding, at least CS4 has more options for Web output, and BluRay options that just came out at the time...It's more robust, but at the expense of being bloated.
I can only guess that CS3 doesn't swallow up as many resources, but i've read about memory leak issues on larger projects...

Also, i believe that CS4 came out with multithreading during encoding..
I could be wrong on that, but if i'm correct, then i'd stick to CS4 for that reason alone....

I appreciate the responses. Hopefully, it won't be much longer so I guess I'll stick with CS4 until then. Thanks.