Early Word on NEW CS3
 

Has anyone been able to put much time into working with the new Premiere in CS3?

Yup, and I like it very much! I am running it with a hardware card though, so my input probably is skewed. I am running the Matrox RTX2, and to be honest, I find it to be fantastic with CS3. Especially if your working with HDV. But even for regular DV, it is great. But CS3 is pretty cool. Not really as much of an upgrade that 2.0 was for pc users, but for the ability to gain Encore in the deal with Premiere, its well worth the upgrade or buy price.

I like it though, and have put quite a bit of time on Prod Premium..

I thought CS3 will work only with MX Tools 3? I don't want to screw up my RTX2 Ppro 2 rig, are you positive everything works as it should? Thanks!

Just upgraded to Premiere Pro CS3 from Premiere Pro 1.5.1 with Cineform Aspect HD and jumped in at the deep end with a 2 camera multicam edit of a 75 minute school arts event.

I wanted to see if CS3 could handle 2 HDV streams natively, without the aid of the Cineform intermediate codec, on a 3 year old 3.2GHz P4 (Core Solo ?!), and I didn't expect it to work.

Surprisingly, it worked very well. The multicam monitor displays were low-res and slightly juddery but still very usable for switching, and playback of the resulting edit was smooth and high res. Don't think it would handle 3 cameras without Cineform or a major hardware upgrade though.

There were some early glitches, like one HDV tape losing audio half way through capture, and the total loss of all keyboard shortcuts during one session, but these were just as likely to inexperience on my part rather than CS3.

So I am happy wih the upgrade, even at the steep price we pay in the UK. The inclusion of OnLocation and Encore CS3 in the upgrade makes it worthwhile.

Tony

Yes please explain how you got cs3 to work with your RT.X2 without Matrox Tools v3.0 being released yet?

Sorry, can't. Freudian slip, LOL But it does not work with tools 2.0 ...

D

I jumped from P Pro 1.5.1 to 2.0 to CS3 in a matter of weeks. I can say that since I installed CS 3, Aspect HD (ver. 5) clips finally play back from the timeline completely smoothly with Premiere Pro CS3. The previous versions had some audio stuttering and the video playback screen going to black briefly when stopping playback.

I did yesterday and today (Also been using encore cs3)
Now I don't know if it has to do with the fact that I opened a 1.5 project with cs3 were I was working on but I allready experienced several crashes in premiere and encore.
My previous version, 1.5, only crashed 2 times in all the years I used it but now I get strange errormessages, I use a singlecore 3,2gig processor with 1gig of memory with win xp home and today encore gave 2 strange errorcodes when I closed it. Also premiere crashed 2 times during rendering of a clip from the timeline to dv-avi.
I had to open a new project and reimport the dv-avis which I exported last week from the 1.5 version and now it seems to work ok. (For now)
Also I notice then when exporting to encore from the premiere time line my pc gets quite slow when encore is opening up as well, guess adobe is pushing my system against it's limits if I open more then one app.
I have to do more editing the following weeks (I have a backlog of 4 weddings) so if more strange things happen I will put then down here again, only then I will write the errormessages down as well and see if I can find out what is causing it. Hopefully I won't have to buy a new pc now to get rid of the problems. :(

Noa,

It sounds like you need to update all your drivers.

I started a new project and finished it today and there were no problems, it seems that CS3 was not so keen on opening an existing project made in version 1.5. My best guess now is that this has caused the crashes since with the new project, and I didn't update any drivers because they were all up to date, everything went fine (Knock on wood :))

I'm really satisfied with my upgrade, in europe we pay allmost double of what adobe charges in the states but even if I feel a bit ripped off, I have no regrets upgrading. Everything that I got used to in 1.5 all got better in cs3. The coolest new feature is the export to flash function in encore cs3, you can export your dvdmenu's together with demo video's directly to flash so you can have a dvdmenu interface with links to your demos like on tv directly in flash and you can put it on your website for your clients. Exporting to flash on my single core pc is quite slow but the result is very good.

The only thing which was a bit annoying is that my pc allready seem to struggle with premiere, the shuttle function in the previewmonitor sometimes skips a few frames when I fast forward which was not the case in version 1.5. (All my drives are defragmented) Also encore is a bit sluggish. Memory usage is also quite high. Premiere has an option were you directly can output to encore. Actually this function is quite useless because premiere is rendering to mpeg first and then opening encore. Because I only have 1gig of memory my machine (3,2gig singlecore) really starts to struggle. I would rather have seen that encore would open and that you could work on the unrendered clips right from the timeline. (something for cs4 maybe? :D)
Now I just export to dvavi from premiere, close premiere and open encore.

I didn't try all the new features yet but my first impression is very good, only I need to add an extra gig of memory I think and maybe better buy a quadcore instead. ;)

My gripe with CS3 is that they changed many keyboard shortcuts and in fact removed ability to quickly toggle between Source and Monitor. I was used to do this by hitting Tab and this way I was REALLY fast when editing. Now I must focus on pressing the right Shift+Number combination. Also, I am unable to insert/overwrite while not focused on Source monitor. It was possible in PPro 2. These little things really hinder my workflow.

If you are running CS3 Premiere, do update into version 3.01.

Update info:
The H.264 info is " The Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 3.0.1 update provides important bug fixes for encoding and decoding H.264-encoded content. Adobe strongly recommends that all users install this update to improve compatibility with H.264 content. "

Going to edit HDV Soon on some Fireworks IN DARK evening