CS4 on Vista

[Vince Becquiot]

Buy a clean copy of Vista and wipe your computer.

Unfortunately, HP, as others do, bundles a ton of crap and you can’t do a clean install using the DVD they provide without reinstalling that same crap. But that’s how they make money after all.

This is a editing app killer, I kid you not…

This is what I had to do for a location laptop and it is night and day.

On top of that, you could turn off the Aero theme, and type MSconfig in the search tab, then uncheck all the start up apps.

Get rid of any antivirus / spyware checkers.

Google Enditall and run it before starting Premiere.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Eddie Lotter]

See also: Support:kb405744 Optimize Windows Vista for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Cheers
Eddie

[Pat Mcgowan]

Vince, we are waiting for Matrox AXIO drivers for Vista 64 and CS4 but I would be very interested in your review of CS4 vs. CS3.

Cheers,

Pat M.

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Pat,

Well, we’ve only been working on CS4 for last month so that would be an early feel.

RAM: you’ll need all you can get, more than for CS3. I hover around 3.8+ gigs with dynamic link (720P DVCPro HD timelines mostly) and when using my laptop I’ve has had a few crashes that I suspect are RAM related, since my 8 Gig machine has been stable.

Not a problem if you don’t use Dynamic link.

Features:

Separate media encoder with render queue, most of us have been waiting for that and Adobe didn’t disappoint.

I’ve seen a few crashes at the very end of renders (AME only) but it didn’t seem to affect the exported footage.

I like the speech to text, great if you do a ton of interviews.
It does take a while to process and it’s not perfect even with studio quality audio.

If you edit DVCPro, you’ll need to go each folder and uncheck read only since it has to write the speech data back to the files.

Nest: Probably my favorite new feature so far. Highlight any part of the timeline, right click “Nest” and voila. It’s one of those features you find more and more useful over time.

Applying or removing effects to multiple clips is also winner.

If you use audition, the edit in audition feature is back.

Nice, but the OMF export feature is far more important for me. That means going to Protools in no time.

I haven’t used the FCP XML import feature, but it sounds like a winner as well. I would really like to see an export feature however.

Some have complained that the dynamic link is slower, I only use it for exporting to AE when the edit is approved so it hasn’t been much of an issue here. It could be an issue for you however…

If you do chroma key, I think you are better of cutting and pasting subclips between Premiere and AE.

Finally, I like the new preview options. You can either render the whole timeline or effects only. That’s an especially great feature if your client is sitting behind you waiting…

One (small) thing I have to grind about:

The effects panel is still buggy. It’s very hard to expand the control settings section (arrow only comes up when you are right over the line).
It needs to be expanded for the dynamics effect for example, and it resets itself every time. The bottom part of some effects still disappears as well when scrolling down, very irritating.

That’s it for now.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Todd Roush]

I can state that we have nothing but horror stories with CS3 and CS4 on our Vista32 and Vista64 computers. Currently CS3 and CS4 won’t open on the 32 system and we can’t find a solution.

Any ideas?

The installation alone took us 10 hours on the phone due to Adobe password/SN issues and I’m about as close to over it as I have ever been with any software. Reminds me of the early 90’s before people figured out how to make software.

Guess we’re either Vegas or Apple bound. This stuff is literally going to put us out of business if we continue.

Good luck.

Todd

Todd Roush
Dreamscape Digital Media
Panny DVX-100’s but changing so Sony or Cannon HDV soon.

[Ken Adolph]

Have you tried to import an FCP xml into windows yet?
I have tried and I get a generic xml error.

Ken Adolph
Media Group
Editor/Post Supervisor
https://www.mg.ca

[Vince Becquiot]

Todd,

That does sound bad. Were those clean installs ?

If not, that’s the first thing I would do.

I have done 3 Vista clean installs without issues, but I guess it’s possible that a certain configuration would cause problems.

Can you post your specs ?

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area