CS4 & Dynamic Link…

[Robert Smyth]

He’s right. You guys all using CS4? I upgraded and now dynamic blows. No more preview without rendering, and render times are so long its just not worth it. Feels more like beta to me. Back to CS3 until Adobe unkinks this thing.

[Tim Kolb]

Cal,

What sort of project settings are you running? I suspect that the fact you’re bringing in the comp in draft mode may actually be slowing it down a bit as PPro is probably working at full res…thereby the render involves an up-rez for the draft mode comp…

AE comps don’t typically play back on a PPro timeline much faster than they would in AE…The idea is to reduce all the redundant media being produced by those “intermediate renders”.

Dynamic link has typically been a RAM-intensive operation (not surprisingly) and for those of us running XP with its 2.5 GB RAM recognition ceiling…it’s particularly taxing with really elaborate comps.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Mike Chapman]

I’m with you, Cal —

I gave up on the whole interop thing pretty quickly after a “finished” sequence we burned to a DVD came up with color bars because the link had somehow broken between AE and Encore.

Adobe marketing is run by clever people and they parse their words very carefully, and they’d have you believe that everything works together seamlessly. And it may do so in their lab while being tested by engineers (nothing wrong with that), but here in the real world it’s not quite so pretty, at least in my experience. I too have had problems with the whole interop concept, especially over issues like scaling stills. In CS3 I could scale still shots (like Jpegs) in the timeline if the stills weren’t too big (else it would crash the app.) Now I have to export the bloody thing to AE, wait while AE fires up, do my move, wait for the round-trip, and hope the plumbing holds together.

Again – looks great on paper and looks fantastic in the press releases and brochures. But I doubt that anyone at Adobe has ever earned a living as an editor. If so, they would realize that “feature creep” and “design-ship-test” has no business in our business.

Mike Chapman

[Tam Perl]

When a company such as Adobe goes public with a product, you expect it to perform. The advertising, the website, the general hype at all the demos (if any of you go to user group meetings) — everything about CS4 has been “sold” to us as a product that does x,y, and z. The fact of the matter is, it does NOT do the things it was cracked up to do. I’m not talking about some speed loss. I’m reading all over the forums about apps crashing, sticking, hanging, output coming out pixelated, and a general bugginess — and there are a lot of unhappy people out there. And the reason I’m looking at forums, is that we are experiencing all these symptoms on 3 separate Macs. We upgraded from CS3 — where we had zero problems. The same footage, the same effects, the same everything, does not work on CS4.

Now don’t tell me about Adobe’s careful wording and marketing, and license agreements which seem to absolve them of everything. We are not beta testers. There are a whole lot of professionals out here who make our living using Adobe products, and we rely on the company to deliver a working product. We rely on the demos and the claims made by the company. Because every feature that doesn’t work, and every bug, costs us in time, money, and aggravation. And I’m starting to sense a grass-roots movement of people who have just had enough.

And my question here is — what do we need to do to make Adobe aware, of just how desperately they need to allocate every possible resource, to fixing these problems NOW, and not in next year’s CS5 upgrade?

[Alex Udell]

Hi Tam…

I agree, software companies should not make its PAYING customers Beta testers. They either need to scale back release feature sets to more comfortably fit the realistic deadlines that the market and their stock holders demand, adjust the release cycles to to fit feature sets, or hire more coders and testers to meet the exiting time frame and feature sets.

All that being said….as a rule of thumb, I always suggest that people not buy a “dot zero release.” This rarely seems to go smoothly. It is tempting however, because manufacturers offer such great incentives to upgrade when the new version is released. Maybe a buy and hold policy might work. Buy the upgrade to take advantage of the pricing, but hold it until the first couple point releases, then if possible, do a gradual deployment, so it can be tested within the work flow for potential work stoppages.

I feel you frustration, and am not excusing anything. Just making some suggestions for how to deal with it on you end.

Best of luck,

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv

[Cal Johnson]

Well this thread seems to be opening a big can of worms, and I thank everyone for their input. Jon, I may have mis-stated my computer situtation. BOTH systems were within the specs recommened by Adobe. One was very close to what you stated, having everything but the new i7 chip, whatever that means! I’m really sorry, I’m not a tech guy, but I did pass on your recommondations to my wife who is way better with computer hardware than I am.

Here’s something though. Since posting I have been able to see CS3 and CS4 in a back to back test on the same machine (my wife’s work has CS3). The Dynamic Link feature I originally asked about worked perfect with CS3. Not only were the rendering times way faster, I didn’t even have to render to preview the After Effects composition that was brought into Premiere. It played well enough in Premiere without generating a render preview, and when I did do a render preview or output, the time was way faster than CS4.

Keep in mind that this is working with exactly the same file, the composition at the same resolution in both cases (setting the composition resolution to half or full in AE made no difference for helping CS4 render times, as someone suggested.)

The way Dynamic Link works in CS3 has tremendous value to me. I can now skip the render process in AE and take the comp straight into my timeline in Premiere. It also allows me to update AE comps and have them update in Premiere without re-rendering an intermediate compostion.

Dave, I agree with Tam and Mike. I shouldn’t have to be thinking like a lawyer and trying to find the pitfalls or loop holes in Adobe’s marketing. Tam is absolutely spot on. I ask you this then: if you can bring in an AE comp into Premiere, but you can’t preview it, it will take you forever to render it, then where is the VALUE in it? How does that serve an editor? And yes, I say “cannot preview”. We tried the 720×480 comp on CS4, and it took forever to render the “preview”. But once it was done, it wouldn’t play back any part of the timeline, just freeze frame and the audio continues. CS3, no problem. Previewed without render, rendered a preview quickly, played back without issue.

I think a number of people assumed I’m coming from CS3; I’m not. This was my first round with the full Adobe Production suite. Also, I really didn’t start this as an Adobe lynching thread… I just wondered what I needed to get CS4 working properly. However, last night despite my other woes with CS4 I output a couple of renders anyways and got the same problem Tam is talking about.. its all pixelated and this is on highest quality. Its clear to me that CS4 has some real issues.

We’re sending the software back. My wife’s work spent $30,000 dollars last time round with CS3 licensing and after talking to her (she found issues with CS4 Photohop) they are not going to go near CS4.

Alex, I don’t believe the CS series has been offered in anything but “dot zero” editions, has it? Maybe I’m wrong. In any case, I totally agree with Tam and Mike. If you’re going to pay $1700 for software, you need it to work. No excuses. I’ve defended Adobe Premiere many times. I’ve taught basic editing classes at our public access TV station with Final Cut, and everyone loves to beat up on Premiere. I tell them that editing software all tends to do the same thing, and not to get too caught up on one program or another. I’m not trying to bash Adobe, I’m just really dissapointed.

Thanks again for everyone’s input. If CS4 is rocking for you without issue, please, by all means spill your guts and tell us poor slobs exactly what system you have to make it work like CS3 did!

Cal

[Avrohom Kohn]

I’m still on CS3, but I do know some people who have upgraded and had nothing but problems. I’m holding off until they fix these bugs.

Dynamic Link in CS3 works ok.

[Sean Tatalovich]

Regarding Dynamic Link by creating a comp in AE and sending to Premiere as a D. Link will the preview rendering affect my quality? No right? And vice versa if I take a sequence in Premiere to AE and back no loss of quality right?

At work we have CS4 and FCP 6 and I am trying to decide which I want to use. I am familiar with both. Not an expert. Going between edit programs and AE is a big deal to me.

Curious can I copy and paste clips from Premiere to AE or vice versa?

[Nicholas Shera]

Yes, you can certainly copy and paste clips between AE and Premiere. You can also import an entire Premiere Pro project into an After Effects project. Of course this method does not use dynamic link.

[Sean Tatalovich]

but you still have render out as animation (long) otherwise face degraded video right?