Anybody tried Mac OS 10.7.3 with CS 5.5?

[Cliff Stephenson]

Yeah, I upgraded to 10.7.3 about a month ago. I don’t know what kind of projects Tom is working on, but I just finished (this morning) cutting a 97 minute documentary in a project that has approx. 16,000 pieces of media in it. While Premiere worked well enough for me on Snow Leopard, it’s beens much more stable since Lion. The biggest issue being when it would crash on Snow Leopard (maybe once every three days, but sometimes twice in a day, especially with Boris or other 3rd party stuff) it would try to save about 20% of the time. Now in Lion, not only is it crashing less (only twice in the last month) it saved both times and I was able to open the recovery project pretty much where I left off.

When I was cutting on FCP, especially near the end of a project, it would crash 5-6 times a night.

I’m running Lion on:
Mac Pro (early 2009)
Dual Quad with 48 GB RAM
Quadro 4000 with the DVI out to my main monitor and the DisplayPort out to the HDMI in on my reference monitor (but I don’t use that for CC)
Using the Blackmagic Decklink Extreme for the audio

Works better than it ever did with FCP.

But I agree with Gerry, Premiere on Mac is woefully inconsistant. It seems odd, given how many people came over to Premiere from Final Cut (a Mac exclusive bit of software) in the last year, that there hasn’t been more of an effort put into getting the Mac side of Premiere up to snuff. I’m also including all the 3rd party guys in this as well. Blackmagic and Aja STILL don’t work as they should with Premiere on Mac. And while Boris finally released Red 5 for Premiere/Mac, I’m baffled as to why they (or anyone else) can’t get proper transitions on the Mac side. There’s a whole folder of BCC 8 transitions and they’re useless. It just applies them as filters to an entire clip (and this is a product that was released not too long ago). I can’t understand how this went through development and QC and nobody thought it was a problem to release a product that didn’t work properly on a MAJOR operating system. I’m excited to see what Adobe has in store for 6.0 and I think I’m good with Premiere for a long while, but EVERYONE really needs to step up their game and really get some good, consistant support on the Mac side of things.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the helpful response, Cliff.

With regard to Premiere Pro and 10.7.3: Did you notice any change between 10.7.2 and 10.7.3? Any improvements? Any things working less well?

The Mac Premiere Pro users probably need to get together and create some type of place where we can put our heads together and work out the pitfalls, tricks and workarounds of Mac + Premiere Pro as we are obviously in the minority on this and the Adobe Premiere Pro forums. There is a lot of complaining on Mac-specific problems but not often a lot of real help available, though again I applaud Todd and others of Adobe in at least commenting on Mac issues when they are posted.

It seems there are pretty varied experiences with the combo, though in general, it seems that Mac users of Premiere Pro want it to be better and are frustrated by varying degrees of instability.

I’m heartened to hear that you had it working reasonably well on such a large project. One thing that I’m trying to do, for the most part, is to NOT transcode and use the material natively, which is one of Premiere Pro’s strong points. My Mac is pretty old, a 2008 3,1 model, and I feel it might be getting too underpowered to handle much of the AVCHD / H.264 encoded source material I’m throwing at it. Are you transcoding prior to importing into Premiere Pro, or importing native? What is the majority of the files’ codecs you’re importing?

Again, thanks, very helpful.