Is CS4 working flawlessly for anyone?

[Mike Velte]

Right out of the box I had mp PC reboot while editing in CS4 in very simple projects. An examination of Windows event viewer shows a DCOM event caused by Itunes Helper 6-10 seconds prior to the reboots. I killed it and all seems well.

[Jon Barrie]

I’m running on an Asus laptop with dedicated Gfx and its been beautiful so far. I did reinstall windows with SP2+SP3+any updates and have not got anything CS3 on it.

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Tim Kolb]

I had one machine where I had to shut down the QuickTime updater…which would spontaneously start and suck resources…but that’s not an Adobe problem.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

CPO, Digieffects

[Ty Yachaina]

Hmm, it might be CS3 thats causing it, But i defiently dont have any other programs running in the background….

[David Dobson]

I can’t get it to install. The installer crashes every time.

[Eric Addison]

It’s running great for me with Vista 64. I did have a few small odd things pop up when opening up a CS3 project in it, but everything else seems fine.

—Eric

[Nathan Tinsley]

I found that the move from CS3 to CS4 was actually an improvement in terms of response. Briefly here are my specs:

Dell Vostro 410
Single Quad Core
3 gigs ram
2 TB video disk RAID 5
NVIDIA GTX280
Windows xp

I’m editing exclusively HDV with no hardware acceleration and no external monitors connected, just the desktop. In CS3 I always noticed that if you minimized or left Premier to open a file browser or something then when you maximized or clicked back on Premier you got this 10-15 sec hourglass in the mouse and had to wait. This got pretty annoying after a while. I noticed in CS4 that this hourglass still occurs but it’s more like 2-3 seconds now. I also feel like it is snappier in terms of responding to my keyboard commands. I have had a few crashes but not so much that it interfered with my work flow. I also REFUSE to go to VISTA!

OK now on to my non technical beef with the new CS4. I get what they are trying to do with the video and audio tabs and I support the idea just not the way Adobe did it. Now you have to tab AND highlight the tracks you want to record onto. If you forget and leave a track highlighted that you don’t want to record on, you blow away material. So you constantly have to make sure you have both a record tab AND a highlight on a track lined up before you do the edit. Just do it the way final cut does it and be done with it! V A1 A2, it’s simple and easy to understand. No STEREO tracks, that useless thing they’ve done for YEARS! This little audio pet peeve of mine has been perhaps the single greatest issue for me ever since I started using premiere. I WILL HANDLE MY OWN STEREO thank you very much on TWO audio tracks that I WILL KEEP TRACK OF! Yes adobe has addressed this finally in CS4 but you have to decide in the preferences how stereo is handled and it’s just plain cumbersome and hard to use.

I also miss the simple export audio and export still commands. I know they’re using the media encoder through the dynamic link but frankly it took too long to open up. My premier project is large and Media Encoder took too long in my opinion to open “Project # 3”. I mean I already have “Project # 3” open in Premiere for crying out loud! I just want to export a wave. This cool new dynamic link actually wasted my time rather than giving me more time.

OK that’s it. I’ll stop. I’ll still keep using CS4 and adobe products because I’m a PC person and for the most part I like the interface.

Nate

[Gary Williams]

I have recently upgraded to Pro CS4 having been using CS3 for about 18 months and previous versions for over 10 years. I am very disappointed in the playback of standard (1080 25i PAL) HDV footage and have had to go back to using CS3. I guess my processor is just not up to the job as I am running with the minimum spec that Adobe specify ( ie Pent 4- 3.4mg) and 3gb of RAM. Adobe have changed the processes involved (they have introduced a new process called importer) and my CPU maxes out at 100% within a few seconds of playback starting and the image in the monitor panels runs slow or freezes (it ran at about 80% with CS3 and playback was fine!). I guess the changes have been made to provide for a wider range of file types however, if CS4 requires more CPU resource Adobe should change the published minimum requirements (still showing as per Pro2.0 as pentium 4 3.4m with 2gb of Ram for HDV footage). I have followed all of the instructions in the technotes but to no avail so I will just have to keep using CS3 until I do my next hardware upgrade. I would have kept my money in my wallet and NOT have gone to CS4 at this stage if I had known about the performance issues and I feel somewhat let down by Adobe.