Adobe CS5

T

the doc

Well-known member
I have a chance to buy the full CS5 editing suite (with photoshop and after effects) quite cheap.

I have always been seriously put off adobe from reading many many complaints about premiere elements being a bug riddden, crash prone piece of junk. But i am still tempted by the extra control this package would give me over my current favourite NLE (power director.)

Can anyone reassure me that the pro version is actually a good buy? Relatively stable / fast / not too much of a pain to use? I am a bit suspicious that if the elements version is so bad.... how would al all these problems be miraculously solved with the more expensive package?
 
the doc said:
I have a chance to buy the full CS5 editing suite (with photoshop and after effects) quite cheap.

I have always been seriously put off adobe from reading many many complaints about premiere elements being a bug riddden, crash prone piece of junk. But i am still tempted by the extra control this package would give me over my current favourite NLE (power director.)

Can anyone reassure me that the pro version is actually a good buy? Relatively stable / fast / not too much of a pain to use? I am a bit suspicious that if the elements version is so bad.... how would al all these problems be miraculously solved with the more expensive package?
Click to expand...
Some Adobe products are indeed full of bugs (Illustrator), but they try to make each consecutive release an improvement. With that said, MPE is obviously the star of the show that is Adobe Premiere CS5. From the initial tests I've done it is reasonably stable and fast with native GH13 footage (I guess MPE+GTX470 does its job).

Can't say much for usability yet. I'm a total editing noob and has started on educational path by watching a series of tutorials by Dave Basulto http://www.youtube.com/user/themediamogul. This also looks like a nice series
http://www.youtube.com/user/aJBprods.

If you find additional resources, please share. Thanks!
 
the doc said:
I have a chance to buy the full CS5 editing suite (with photoshop and after effects) quite cheap.

I have always been seriously put off adobe from reading many many complaints about premiere elements being a bug riddden, crash prone piece of junk. But i am still tempted by the extra control this package would give me over my current favourite NLE (power director.)

Can anyone reassure me that the pro version is actually a good buy? Relatively stable / fast / not too much of a pain to use? I am a bit suspicious that if the elements version is so bad.... how would al all these problems be miraculously solved with the more expensive package?
Click to expand...

I've used After Effects for 7-8 years now. When I worked on a PC, I did experience some number of 'hangs', etc. But then I've experienced that with almost any significant software package on a PC...

I've been using the CS* suites now for about 4-5 years, and while I have had a few 'unexpected exits', I think most of the time things have been pretty stable.

I've switched over to using CS4 and CS5 Premiere Pro, due to the lack of 'real' support for AVCHD in Final Cut Express, which I used predominantly before getting the CS* packages, and still used, letting Premiere sort of lie unused for the most part.

The problem with AVCHD for now is that the laptop I use for my video work, is beginning to show its age... and so I have to 'render' to see things in 'real time' play back.

As for 'reliability'... I've never had to 'throw away the preferences' in Premiere... which is a frequent piece of advice given to the Final Cut user...

As a note, I've not tried to use any Firewire I/O in Premiere, which is where there may be some amount of trouble, given the variety of PC hardware, and variety of effective drivers for Firewire... When I did use Firewire on a Mac, and using Final Cut, I would occasionally get a hang, but I think that may be due to Firewire <-> camera interactions than Mac + Final Cut issues.

If you have a 'deal' then I'd recommend taking advantage of it.

Oh, yeah... speaking of 'Elements'... while I've never used Premiere Elements, the Wife gave a seminar at a local library last weekend, and I installed Adobe Photoshop Elements for her to demo to the 'typical library user' audience she expected.

Needless to say, after using Photoshop in various versions since 2... Elements was sort of a 'shock'... and she was not 'amused'... but she was able to demo some techniques for the people, so it did go ok... just there's quite a difference between the Elements and the Full Monty... I suspect there may be a similar thing in Premiere Elements and CS5 Pro...
 
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I´m a full time user of CS5 Suite for professional work, mostly AfterEffects and PremierePro for editing, making 3d in Autodesk Maya 2011 too, all in a MacPro workstation, making TV spots and producing a 13 chapter series with Cell animation and compositing, video filmed with the GH13 at 1080i and downgraded to Standard Definition 720x480, no HD in my country yet.

And no mayor problems with the CS5 Suite, for me is a pleasure to work with it.
 
BBC switched to from FCP and AVID to Premiere Pro CS5 and bought 2000(!) new seats with that suite. That alone should tell you something.

Frank
 
Use CS5 daily for professional work.

Works as advertised, no crashes. Fully RT with the right hardware (or slightly modified video card .txt file to add CUDA support).

I'm actually lovin' it.
 
I've found Premiere CS5 to be more stable than Premiere CS4 and much faster as well. Some have seen some hiccups though and Adobe already has an released an update at the beginning of this month. It is worth checking out that posting as Adobe still has a list of known issues they are working on for the next release.
 
i've been using photoshop/illustrator since around version 4 (when you could only undo something once! :smile:)

personally i've found the entire adobe suite to be pretty good, i'm running CS5 now and really enjoy it, not had much experience with other video editing software.

i did get to use photoshop ELEMENTS a while back and OMG i found it bad! it looked like the PRO version but with 80% of the features stripped out, i was lost and my workflow went way down, but that was photoshop.

ADOBE have been pretty much top of the software block when it comes to creative stuff for the past 10 years, industry standard for a lot of the more print related programs, photoshop, illustrator, indesign...

i like the fact that they cover every area as i like to wander into other mediums, once you know one program the rest all have a similar layout and stuff so it becomes easy to learn quickly.

ps: this is just my experience with ADOBE :smile: i'm sure some people will have more experience with others to compare
 
Have CS5, but I find premiere pro bloated and odd in the last several versions and I am a fan of soney vegas pro. I do use a lot of photoshop, sound booth, dreamweaver... and I love encore... one of the few packages that does native 24p dvds correctly.
 
is this the preferred NLE to use with GH1/2 footage?

is it possible to run it on a laptop? (im planning to buy a gh2 in the near future and will also need to buy/build a editing system (windows) and am hoping that I could get away with getting a decent laptop instead of a desktop)
 
CS5 will work on a laptop, but if you want to use it to edit h.264/AVCHD footage, you'd be best served to choose a laptop that has an nVidia CUDA graphics card. I'm running it on a Lenovo W510 with an nVidia Quadro FX 880M graphics card and it fairly screams through h.264 footage (note I had to use the CS5 graphics card hack to get it to recognize the FX880M).
 
I just posted in the workflow forum that Premiere Elements version 9 (released in the last few days) does work properly with GH1 / GH13 footage - here at least - unlike the previous two versions. But it lacks the pro features of CS5 of course.
 
I got Production Premium CS5 on my laptop and I can edit the GH1's non hacked AVCHD files very smoothly. Specs? 2.4Ghz Core2Duo Processor, 4 gigs of Ram and a 512MB ATI card. I've had this computer for nearly 2 years by the way. With CS4, the motion would sometimes not be 100% smooth but with CS5, it's like 20% more stable. I didn't want to spend the money and upgrade CS4 thinking that I might only just notice a slight boost because of my graphics card but it does work better and I got to finish projects faster. As far as Aftereffects in concerned, it's much better but definitely not perfect.

Still, I do think it's time to get a new laptop or desktop computer with an i7 processor, at least 8 gigs of RAM and at least a 1,000MB NVidia card.
 
I'm using Premiere CS5 and a client asked me about whether he should get APE for his editing. I hadn't looked at it in a while, and was kinda surprised how un-Premiere it looked, acted etc. After reviewing the trial version for a bit, I suggested he not go for it, but stick with his Movie Maker or go to Pro instead. I loved CS3, heard a lot of ugly things about CS4 so skipped that and now love CS5 more than CS3.

If you are going with the suite, you are just going to go wild about how well it all is integrated together. When you build your AE or Photoshop project, you import the project to Premiere, not the end product. Premiere reads the information and treats it like it was rendered footage.

In this project I am doing, I created the titles in Photoshop. I screwed up the name of the project, reversed two words in the name. Because I imported the Photoshop Projects and not images, all I had to do was open Photoshop, make my corrections, save them and the corrections were everywhere, including in Premiere. All that was necessary was re-render and go.
 
I am confused, I am running CS4 on a macbookpro, and don't know about this CUDA hack. Can someone enlighten me? (currently checking to see what CUDA means and looking at Macbook graphic cards to check in the meantime).
 
greymog said:
I am confused, I am running CS4 on a macbookpro, and don't know about this CUDA hack. Can someone enlighten me? (currently checking to see what CUDA means and looking at Macbook graphic cards to check in the meantime).
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First you need CS5, second you need a nvidia graphics card for CUDA and the last time I checked, the only one approved for MAC was the GTX285.
 
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