Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

I started several years ago doing simple stuff with windows movie maker, then moved up to cyberlink power director for a couple years before taking the leap and buying the adobe production suite. I can't say enough about how great this program is, especially after coming from cheaper programs that have many limitations. I am not a professional producer but I do like videos I make to look sharp and professional, and adobe premiere has been perfect for me. It does take some time to learn all the ins and outs of the program which is made easy by lynda.com videos. The potential for media collaboration with after effects, soundbooth, and other adobe programs seems limitless and I am now focusing on learning how to enhance my videos by utilizing these various programs.

for example, I recently made a promotional video for an organization that i am a part of. I created custom background music in soundbooth using its resource center. I created the organizations logo in Illustrator, imported it into After Effects where i animated it and added some dramatic effects, and then i imported it into my timeline on premiere.

I have spent some time messing around with final cut pro and my experience is that they provide the same editing resources but premiere just seems much more intuitive. Maybe for professional editors who relish in technical complexity final cut makes the most sense, but for the discerning hobbyist or prosumer, premiere pro is definitely the way to go

in response to the other 2 posts. i have used the scene detection in premiere's capture software and it works great as long as you do not have any breaks in the timecode.

and oh yea...macs are overrated

I love Premiere Pro CS4... I have it as part of my Production Premium package. But the info on this page is MISLEADING! Currently Premiere does NOT support AVC-Intra natively. I'm looking into buying Panasonic's new HPX-300 which supports AVC-Intra, and unfortunately although it is listed in Premiere's options the program can't actually import any AVC-Intra files. I spoke with someone today from Adobe who confirmed this and said that they will have a beta codec available this fall.

I used to use Adobe Premiere CS3 with Windows XP Professional. It had a few issues, but on the whole, it was a pretty reliable package. When CS4 came out, I upgraded to Windows 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 at the same time. I can't tell you how sorry I am. In the middle of rendering I keep getting an "unknown error" with no information as to how to solve the problem. Encore freezes up when I try to import media files that were rendered by Premiere and it locks up my computer to the point where I have to do a hard restart because nothing responds. You learn to save very often, because Premiere also locks up periodically, requiring you to close the program. Dolby 5.1 surround surcode (which worked great with CS3) doesn't seem to be working at all--no sound at all from the tracks that are assigned to the rear surround speakers. The rendered video and audio from the media encoder are different lengths, so if you try to create a playlist in Encore, you end up with the video and audio quite a ways apart. When I tried to render a video using AVI files, the video rendered several times faster than the audio, so you end up with a normal sounding audio track with a video that gallops along and then hangs on the last frame.

Now for the fun part: When you contact technical support, you end up on the phone with somebody from India who speaks limited English and doesn't know very much about computers in general and even less about Adobe Premiere. When they can't solve your problem, they escalate your case, but you never hear from them again. (I have waited a month--I keep calling, but the only people I ever talk to are the people in India because they will tell you that there is no way to contact anybody in technical support in the United States.) Their idea of help: They type your question into a computer and read off the results from their database, whether or not the solution that they found relates to your particular situation.

MAC users might experience HDV preview problems while capturing or scene detection issues. That's a minor inconvenience for what you get overall (you can monitor the video being captured on your camera or deck).

Overall, Premiere Pro has come a LONG WAY! I edit on a PC (I know MAC rules! Anyway...) Old Premiere 6.5 and older were buggy and lackluster. CS4 however is indeed a professional tool that kicks butt. I left Premiere 6.5 for AVID Xpress Pro. I never thought I would return to Premiere, but after experience the cool features like dynamic link, OnLocation, speech search, better metadata features, I said later AVID.

Premiere Pro CS4 is great. I can do EVERYTHING with it I did with AVID, but better. Wish I had the Production premium CS4 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time and would have made my workflow much more enjoyable.

Premiere Pro CS4 can hang with the big boys now. I have the entire Master Creative Suite. I am a very happy camper.

Highly recommend for all editors who do serious time painstaking work. This will only make your life sooo much easier. At least on a PC anyway. I have not use it on a MAC. I know Mac rules! Whatever... :)

My rating of 3, as opposed to 4 stars or better, is mostly based on the help menu. Unless you are connected to high speed internet the help files are useless. For a $700 program I want to able to access decent help files whether I am on a plane, vacation, whatever. Also this program does not read simple .avi files like those produced by consumer cameras, even though windows media player and most other free programs read these video files just fine. Premiere elements will also read those files. I expected that Premiere Pro, which costs 5x as much, should be able to do as much and more than premiere elements.

I agree with the other posters that the options to work with other Adobe programs through dynamic link is very nice. If you are in to editing and want to step it up a notch, you will like this program.

So, I've had Edius Neo for a couple years, and now I get the great Adobe Premier Pro and I'm using it to edit together some footage of a wedding I shot using both Sony Hi8 camcorder footage converted to 29.97 FPS AVI files and some 30 FPS AVI video from my Canon camera.

I import the AVI from my Canon and it freezes on playback. Then I discover I'm supposed to use Adobe Encoder to convert the 30 FPS video to 29.97. Luckily I've got that, so I convert the Canon camera video and import it into my Premier Pro project, and it looks like lousy ultra-compressed garbage.

So, I go back to my Edius Neo, which you can get for $100 now, and I bring the Sony Camcorder footage AVIs and the Canon Camcorder video AVIs right into a project and into the same sequence and it all plays perfectly. What gives?

Sheesh, and I can't even burn a DVD with Premier Pro, but I have to export files and use Encore to create my DVD. Edius Neo has a useable, if not opulent, DVD authoring tool built in.

So, if you're mainly a person who wants to edit together home videos from your camcorders and cameras and make functional if not fancy DVDs, consider Edius Neo. The user interface is baffling at first, but at least it's all there and it works and it costs very little compared to this over hyped disappointment.

I was a newbie at making videos, and started off last year (2009) with Roxio Video Wave (which I would also highly recommend to anyone starting brand new). However, as my skills progressed, I found I kept wanting to do more than Roxio could accommodate.

I trialed lots of software (I tried Corel's suite, Nero's, Cyberlink's PowerDirector, Adobe Premiere Elements and Premiere Pro), with my hopes set the highest on Cyberlink PowerDirector and the Adobe Premiere products.

Being a Photoshop user since Version 3 and loving that program, I couldn't wait to try the relevant Adobe Premiere Elements and Elements Pro. Unfortunately, they were total disappointments because of their complexity, kept crashing (those users who complain about that aren't kidding), and the lack of some basic intuitive interface workings. Plus with Adobe they install all sorts of extra "crap" software that runs checking registration, etc.

Reluctantly, I tried Sony Vegas Pro. I was reluctant because seriously... how many people have received decent software from a camera or hardware electronics manufacturer? Zip. Zero. You get those cheezy programs to make short clips or transfer files from your camera to computer, but that's about it.

Well, let me say Sony's software division that created Vegas Pro has certainly altered my stereotype!

Adobe's functionality is too complex for what I need/want in a software package. It doesn't accommodate all the little things I find "non professional" producers would do. For instance, if I want a clip in a Vegas Project, I can just drag and drop it from Windows explorer onto the timeline. In any Adobe Premiere project or PowerDirector, it's a 2-step process of first having to "import" it into your media library and then dragging from your media library onto your timeline.

Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Elements take over a minute to start up and continuously crash with the "Adobe has encountered an unexpected issue and must now close". It's annoying to have to constantly save before every move because of the fear moving one little thing will crash the system!

It's also bloated software, installing more software than you need -- eg, license checkers, background processes, etc.

Another big disappointment with Adobe Premiere Pro is you can not preview transitions and video effects *before* you actually apply them! Who the heck wants to have to memorize transitions/effects to know what they might look like on your time line before rendering?

As much as I love Adobe Photoshop (and recently purchased the CS4 version), for video production I'm definitely a Sony Vegas software convert and would not recommend these Adobe products to anyone.

Two stars.

I would like to give "-1" if possible! I think people developing this software should be fired because they produce a junk!!

As a fan of movie maker, I used another software to edit short family video. Somebody recommended Adobe Premiere CS4 to me in 2010. After spending hundreds of dollars, I did not have chance to use it until now. It seemed to be similar to Final Cut and previous software I used. It could import HD format file. However, problem appeared when I exported file. It was ridiculous to take about 60 mins to render a file with a size of 8MB!! Further, I found many complains to the same problem online! I was really regretful to spend hundreds of dollars in this piece of junk!!

You can still find the same issue online even in CS5 version. I am really confused how this trash can be survived! I guess the only reason is that users with negative comments have never told others. This explains why I would like to post my comments today!!

No scene detect for HDV. No Video review during capture.

Even Little $40 apps give you these options. Dont waste your money there are much better options available.