CS4 - not for prime time

Did you ever wonder why most product reviews, especially those on products from huge companies, are almost always glowing, "goody-goody" articles? Do ya think that the tens of thousands of dollars that companies like Adobe spend with your favorite video magazines might affect those reviews just a tad?

Well, we don't get a dime from Adobe. Sure, I'd consider writing a glowing review if Adobe offerred me ten grand or so in advertising. After all, there's at least a tiny bit of "Blagojevich" in each of us! But until that happens <LOL> here's an unvarnished look at CS4 from my perspective..

And ever wonder why you don't see many negative posts on Adobe's forums?  I just got a notice that my post with bugs and complaints was removed "becaue it included a feature request".

WHICH VERSION?
(Or.."Choose whichever you like - and they'll send whichever THEY like!")

When we switched over from standard to hi-def video (hdv), we decided it was time to upgrade from CS3 Master Collection to CS4 Master Collection.

I needed Master Collection because I also do web development work. When I saw the ad, the price looked almost too good to be true, so I telephoned and confirmed the price they showed for upgrading to CS4 and was told I could even upgrade to CS4 MC from Premiere Pro 2.0 for that price because they (this particular well-known, heavily advertised dealer) had worked a "special deal" with Adobe.

Well, that was just super, because we were using PP 2.0 on my wife's computer for capture and for lifting stills for DVD covers, etc. Now, from what this sales person was saying, I could upgrade PP2.0 to CS4 MC and move the CS3 MC to her computer, thus upgrading both systems.

Because of the holidays, it was three weeks before I realized that what they'd sent me was actually CS4 Production Premium - not Master Collection. My emails and phone calls essentially got nowhere because they claimed it was I who must have been confused with the different versions of CS4, not them.

Half a day spent on phone calls to Adobe only confirmed that there is no upgrade path from Production Premium to Master Collection. No matter how much you're willing to pay, Adobe isn't willing to upgrade you!

So there's my first warning to you - be sure of the version you're buying and don't get Production or Design Premium thinking that you'll upgrade to Master Collection later - it ain't gonna happen! (Please click the 'Read more' link..)

ADOBE STOLE MY ULTRA?

Several years ago, I purchsed a fantastic green screen program called "Ultra" from Serious Magic, for one thousand dollars. I don't often lay out that much cash for software, but this was really cool because it made green screen keying simpler and gave clean keys. It also included some awesome background sets, some with really cool camera dolly moves.

Ultra was purchased by Adobe and included in CS3 Master Collection and Production Premium. Of course, I expected Ultra to be in CS4 also, but no. Adobe decided that I didn't need Ultra any longer, even though they've done nothing to replace it.

Without a word, Adobe dropped a program that is arguably worth more than Premiere Pro and more than After Effects, thus lessening the value of the CS4 packages to well below their going prices.

But it's worse than "without a word" because Adobe's installation program works like a thief in the night, replacing my CS3 programs with no more warning than a short statement in a very tiny font and by that time it appears to be too late any way.

Is that even legal? After all, I not only paid Serious Magic for Ultra, but I paid for Adobe's CS3 Master Collection which included Ultra. Where's my refund when CS4 removes the program??? (Thankfully Ultra 2.0 still runs!)

THE GOOD NEWS

Premiere Pro no longer locks up when I scroll through a bin in icon mode. And it seems just fast enough for doing multiple video and audio tracks with hdv on my Intel 3.0 Extreme system. In fact, neither PP nor Encore locked up on me a single time throughout my first day editing of our first hdv wedding project. (That luck wouldn't hold out on subsequent days.)

BAD NEWS - Premiere Pro

No scene detect -

Premiere Pro still doesn't have a critical feature than even most $99 NLE programs have - scene detect and ability to monitor hdv video during capture. This is such a huge omission that I bought Sony Vegas 8 ($129 through B & H) just for capture and its scene detect capability.

Stills take 6 times longer -

In CS3, I'd set a custom keystroke for exporting stills.  A window would pop up with my last path/filename and I'd merely increment the filename and click "Save".  Total time - 5 seconds per still.

In CS4, you can set a keystroke to bring up your "Export Media" window.  It will remember your settings but not your path and filename.  So you must click that part, browse to your folder and type your entire filename.  Total time (at best) 30 seconds.  If you're doing 120 stills from video (a good number for a slide show), CS4 will take you at least one hour longer than CS3.

I say "at least" because it is so easy to make mistakes while you're having to retype the entire path and filename each time that I found myself frequently having to go back and fix things.  And I haven't counted the render time yet. You see, as you select each frame, it puts your choices into a "render queue", waiting for you to finish your selections at which time you click the "Start Queue" button and rendering begins.  It would take two hours to render 120 stills on my 3.0 GHz Intel Extreme system.

And here's something that just happened to me - in the middle of all this, I got a phone call.  When I hung up and went back to my process of selecting stills, I couldn't recall whether the one on the timeline had yet been added to the queue or not.  There is no way to look at your selections until they are actually rendered.

But that's not all.  With 118 of my 120 still images selected and waiting in the "Media Encoder" queue, my Vista 64 computer locks up tight.  No mouse.  No task manager.  I had no apps running except Premiere Pro CS4 and Adobe Media Encoder.  I have a clean machine with more than a terabyte of drive space, 4 gigs of RAM and a 3.0 Intel Extreme processor.

When I get PP running again, all my stills that were queued are gone.  Media Encoder hasn't remembered a single one.  Even my last auto-save project which was only ten minutes old, has an empty Media Encoder.  The entire evening has been wasted.  Thank you, Adobe.

Why would Adobe want to make changes that cause a 6:1 time delay over a previous version and make what was a straight-forward process become such a clutzy one?  Better still, why would you want to buy such a "downgrade" version?

BAD NEWS - After Effects

Some of the lower light situations were pretty grainy since our hdv cameras aren't quite as good in low light as our VX2100s were, so I checked out After Effects ability to reduce the grain. The "good news" is that judging by the preview, AE does a great job of reducing grain. The bad news is that AE repeatedly locked up after about the two minutes of rendering.

I made sure that Vista Ultimate was entirelly up to date, all my drivers were entirely up to date and, according to Adobe, all its software was entirely up to date. I have four gigs of ram and plenty of free drive space, but AE still locked up at nearly all tasks. It seems that After Effects CS4 is entirely useless to me until Adobe comes up with a fix.

BAD NEWS - Flash

I opened Flash CS4 for the first time and the first thing I clicked on was "Take a feature tour". This brought up a window that said:

Error: The value you are trying to set was not declared

..then it listed ten items, each on a separate line. I haven't a clue what to do about it or how to fix it. I'll wait until I need to use Flash and hope that an Adobe update has fixed it by then.

BAD NEWS - Encore

I liked some of the menu templates that Encore CS3 had and wanted to use one of them for this project, but apparently Adobe didn't like that one (and several others) because I couldn't find it anywhere in the template folders. Another case of Adobe taking stuff away from us without our consent - stuff we've previously paid for. It's like me selling you a car. You pay me in full and a year later I come and remove the air conditioning and radio without explanation or compensation -

Nice way to do business, huh?

BAD NEWS - Photoshop

The 64 bit version keeps telling me it needs something from my video card manufacturer's website (NVIDIA) but even though I click "OK" every time, it only brings me to a page that scrolls for fifteen screen heights full of tech info. This happens every single time I run Photoshop 64bit. I guess some day I might have time to read all fifteen pages of fine print in Adobe's knowledge base and half a day or so to try and figure it all out, but until then (probably when hell freezes over) I'll just keep running the 32bit version.

SUMMARY

Not that we didn't have warning about these tactics. Adobe stole Audition from us in an earlier release (CS3?) and "replaced" it with a watered-down "Soundbooth". If Adobe is going to continue this "tradition" their next release (CS5?) should be clearly labelled as a "DOWNGRADE"!

And we had plenty of warning that Adobe wasn't bashful about tossing in handfulls of bugs in their software releases too.

Regardless of the usefulness of some of their programs, I am so ticked off at their practices that I've will probably take the time to learn Sony Vegas and buy DVD Architect, then put CS4 on ebay. No wait...not ebay...I'm ticked at them too. I'll put CS4 on craigslist.

What is so unfortunate and frustrating is that Adobe has a great user interface in all its products and great features, if they only worked properly.  It seems that Adobe turned too much over to its programmers and didn't do sufficient beta testing with real video producers.  Lets hope they wake up and smell the coffee before it's too late.