Customer Reviews

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've used every incarnation of Premiere and the accompanying Encore so I'm qualified to comment here. Adobe also includes their 'Media Encoder' that runs independantly of Premiere to transcode clips. Encore is the DVD/Blu-Ray creation application that used to be sold on its own but now comes packaged with Premiere.
On the whole these application work well and I'd be happy to recommend them were it not for some astonishing flaws that seem to be aimed directly at the target audience, more of that later.
So, Premiere rarely lets me down. I'm running a very high end machine so I can edit HD footage (HDV and AVCHD) and it just breezes through it. Even with my machine (Intel i7 975 clocked at 4.15Ghz with 12Gb RAM) trascoding takes quite some time but we're talking an hour as opposed to all night on my old machine. Premiere takes full advantage of multi core processors as does the media encoder, I can tell because my cpu temperature rockets when using this stuff. So, Premiere and the encoder are good so what's the problem? ENCORE and Dolby Digital!
Firstly Dolby Digital. You'd presume, would you not, that an application that costs nearly £700 and that is directly targeted at a pro or semi-pro audience and is capable of handling multi channel audio during the edit process would therefore be able to include that multi channel audio in the transcoded final output? Right? Well no. Premiere can do it only with the aid of a third party plugin that is included on a 3 shot trial basis. After that it's nearly $300 (dollars) to buy a license and then only for one PC. It's probable that reinstalling Premiere (if you upgrade to Windows 7 or just have a bad day) will lose that licence and you'd better hope the third party software house is still in business to supply a new one after you've jumped through the verification hoops on the phone! This is ridiculous. Adobe claim that they don't include the Dolby Digital capability by default because the Dolby license would add a couple of hundred dollars to the price of their software. So what?! It's overpriced to start with and most likely a business expense so what difference would it make other than the user ending up with a fully functional application?! I was incensed by this when I realised why every time I transcoded 5.1 sound it ended up as stereo. It makes the app near useless for Blu-Ray or DVD work. Amazingly the FREE DVD/Blu-Ray burning software that comes with my SONY AVCHD camcorder DOES fully utilize Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Go figure: Adobe ruins a high end product by not including it and SONY gives it away for free. Amazing!
That leads me on to Encore.
When it works, Encore is good. I know how to get around most of its 'issues' now but again, don't bank on 5.1 sound. In theory it can do it if you give it exactly the right audio file but you'll be sacrificing goats and waving magic wands before that happens. More importantly I spent 4 days last week going half mad with frustration (sincerely) because no matter how I tried I could not get Encore to build what appeared to be a perfectly acceptable Blu-Ray. Encore's built in checker said it was OK and yet for days and days of seemingly endless attempts it failed with a generic and uninformative error. Eventually, I pinned it down to a couple of frames in the raw HDV footage that Premiere was ignoring, no problems and no failure on the edit but that Encore refused to transcode. Basically Encore is a fragile dog of an application. When it works, great, but when it fails you'll be hard pressed to know why and it fails a LOT. EVERY version of Encore I've used has been the same, riddled with bugs, and it's not pilot error.
So. In conclusion. This could be what it appears to be: a professional editing and disc creation suite. But it's not. It's an amateurish bug ridden mess that'll give you grief and cost you a small fortune. Adobe makes some stunning products, PhotoShop for example but they've NEVER got their video production software right and probably never will. Avoid.

I spend hours in the field getting some HD video and sound and put together a new computer running an Intel Q9300 with a VISTA performance rating of 5.9. I buy Production Premium CS4 and spend hours editing with Premiere Pro. Then Encore CS4 crashes repeatedly. I dutifully send crash reports to Adobe without ever getting a response. I download and carefully read the "fine print" instructions to create playlists, chapter menus, etc. I suppose if I just used Adobe's corny menus and buttons, everything might work -- but what kind of creative person wants to use stock material left over from a kid's birthday party? Encore CS4 is crucial if you want to put your stuff on a DVD or Blu-ray disc. And when Encore blocks the creative process, it should be condemned for what it is -- one of the worst pieces of software I've ever encountered.

Here's what I'm looking for: Software that helps me get the job done. Not software that becomes the object of a giant learning industry. Encore CS4 gives no hint when the user strays outside of the approved Adobe path (other than popping a "General protection error" screen). Encore CS4 is not a flexible creation tool: Do it Adobe's way or encounter lots of problems. I love it when I'm using the text tool and make a spelling mistake, hit delete and the whole button or other object disappears. You see, Adobe's text tool doesn't work like a word processor. Bottomline: Get Final Cut Pro and Pro Studio, and run Apple's Pro Res on a Mac. I surely will next time.Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium

I have used Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Encore extensively for several years. I have used all versions from pre-CS2 to CS4. I have used them on multiple PC platforms, in 32 bit XP, 32 bit Vista and 64 bit Vista environments. I have created hundreds of DVDs and dozens of blu-ray disks. In a nutshell:

1) Photoshop is a great, powerful product
2) Premiere Pro is a decent and reasonably powerful editing tool, although buggier and less stable than it should be.
3) Encore is, and always has been, a very buggy, unstable, unreliable, sloppy piece of work. And in my experience, after many calls to Adobe technical support, many of Adobe's feature claims in Encore are false. They simply don't work. It is hard to believe that anyone in the Encore development group even checks their work. What a mess. And it has always been this way.

If you work on photographic images, by all means use Photoshop, a great tool. For video? It is hard to believe the video tools are from the same company. You will spend as much time trying to get the tools to work as you will doing actual video production. And don't believe any of the feature claims from Adobe. If you must try it, download the free trial and make sure it does everything you need first.

I am deeply wedded to Photoshop since I do a lot of photo restoration and it is a great tool. That, along with generally decent performance of Premiere Pro and a major learning curve investment has kept me coming back to each new release in hopes that it will get better. But it doesn't, and I now doubt it ever will. In my experience, Adobe technical support is rarely even aware of the bugs, and never able to offer any help with them. There is a pervasive sense of incompetence that eminates from every Encore release. It shows up throughout the product in a variety of ways, too numerous to list here. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and if you want to produce DVDs or BDs then Encore is one of the links and brings down the entire suite. It is a shame, since the feature set (in principal, not in reality) and the tight integration of the products could result in a great toolset if the programming was not so incompetent.

So I am done with it, and off to evaluate other products. You should too...

For the amount of money being charged for this package, it would be nice if everything worked at least some of the time. But as it stands, the components crash more than they work. Premiere works for a few minutes, then crashes my system. Same with Encoder. Encore literally won't open on my computer. I have gone back to using CS3, which for all it's problems, actually works more often than not.

"If you polish a turd, it is still a turd!"

That is exactly what has been done here. The framework for these programs was not updated at all from CS3. They have changed a few of the windows and visual layouts in several of the programs. But, regardless of the visual changes, the programs still fall far short of the amount of money that you will pay for this.

The programs (even though Adobe Support says they can!) will NOT function properly in 64-bit operating systems. I upgraded from CS3 and Windows XP about a half a year ago. It has been a massive mistake. CS3 is amazing in 32-bit XP with the workload that I had (wedding photography, video production/editing). CS4 has been nothing but a frustration with Windows 7 64-bit.

CONS:
Premiere is by far the worst of all the programs. Any HD footage that I import and edit (JVC GHD250 or Canon Rebel t2i) is choppy, freezes, or crashes the program. Regular NTSC footage can play almost perfectly. But anything 720p or above causes Premiere to freeze and skip constantly. The effects in the program are a joke, at least compared to After Effects.

Media Encoder is the biggest mistake that Adobe has EVER made. Consistently it has issues encoding fades, effects, color balancing, and quality. It also leaves files choppy, with blank spaces and white frames (which randomly show up). The program also freezes and crashes on a very frequent basis -- 65-70% of the time. The encoder left me beyond frustrated, and caused many projects to be encoded 2-3 times before a "clean" copy was made.

PROS:
Photoshop - 32-bit. Period. The 64-bit copies are a joke. Don't even bother with it. GPU syncing is also a joke (causes frequent crashes and adds about 35% to the load/render time for images -- even though there is little difference in quality or workload). If you stay away from the 64-bit and the GPU syncing, then you will be happy with it! If they cut the cost of Photoshop 32-bit by about $200, then it would be worth every penny.

In the end, you should just save your money for CS5 (the demo/30 day trials worked great on my machine!), or just find an old used copy of CS3.

Not much to say that hasn't already been said. I'm a 3d artist and I love the new 3d features in Photoshop/AE. Outside of that the cs4 suite seems to be an upgrade worth the money. I jumped from cs3 to cs4 at home and i'm glad I did, still using cs2 at work and boy i wish I had some of the cs4 features there.

First, I have to say that I rarely use Premiere or Encore in my work, so this review is for Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Soundbooth. I use Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro in my work as a freelancer, and I couldn't do my job without them. Final Cut you say?!? This guy is talking about the MAC version. Not really, I use BOTH versions, so that's why I'm writing this here. The negative reviews here center on Premiere and Encore, so I wanted to let people know that the other apps in the bundle work flawlessly. After Effects is the standard for motion graphics production, able to do nearly anything you can imagine. Photoshop is the standard for re-touching and image manipulation and is used by every video professional I know. The program keeps getting better and better, adding 3D manipulations and filtering to satisfy any video need. Soundbooth has helped me get acceptable sound from clips most people thought were unsalvageable, and Illustrator is invaluable for handing vector artwork from clients and agencies.