Should I upgrade from CS3 to CS4?

J

jacotte

Carbonite Member
We filmed a movie this year. I have not been up speed on any Premiere developments in the past 9 months, so I now need some feedback.

Now that the production is over, I wonder whether I am better off sticking with CS3 and all its patches or move up to CS4. This is a 2 hour movie with all the trimmings. Here is my current configuration:

Premiere CS3
Processor: Intel Quad Core 9300
Motherboard: Asus P5E
Win XP Family Edition
Cineform Prospect

I use 1.5 Gigabyte SATA 2 drives without Raid.

What upgrades would be recommended or useful and should I switch to CS4 and-or Windows 7? Or is the current configuration more reliable? I need to get everything in shape for the post production work. Again, this is a 2 hour movie.

Thank you.
 
More important question is can you wait long enough to get CS5 when it comes and stay on the edge without having to pay to upgrade twice.
 
I think you should wait. CS5 release is right around the corner and Premiere CS4, for most people, has seemed to cause more incompatibilities/bugs than CS3.
 
Yes, cs4 was pointless for me, CSS3 worked, CS4 works 3 times slower (I use cineform, so slower as cineform doesn't have real time as it did in cs3).

CS5 should be out next month.
 
i tried cs4 and i could not get it to render ANYTHING... they moved the rendering engine from a dedicated module within premiere, to a dedicated one among all adobe suite programs... and it does not work, so i went back to cs3!
 
I actually quite like the way that CS4 is implemented compared to CS3. Some design issues that came up initially but they've ironed it out through updates, and the upgraded features are pretty significant

1) The ability to design custom sequence, meaning you can do things like have a native 2.35:1 sequence without having to letterbox.
2) Implementation of Media Encoder as a separate render engine means that you can now queue up render or even edit while a render is in progress.
3) Much tighter integration of After Effects and Encore via Dynamic link.
4) 64-bit support (though not quite native 64 bit) for faster render.

Overall it's a nice bunch of upgrades that really move the program forward, and for me it's been a lot more stable than CS3. It's worth the upgrade but with CS5 on the horizon, it might be better just to wait for that.
 
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