Premiere CS4 on the mac is a disaster

[Peter Berthet]

as far as im aware CS4 has the same features on mac or PC,
further NO software allows you to preview HDV footage during capture, you always need to look at your camera

while there are undoubtedly problems with CS4 in general, is there something specific you were having problems with ? or was this a general gripe?

ive been building huge bluray projects in encore and not experienced any odd crashes, iMovie is great too! if you just want some template dvds.. if your set on authoring your own dvd’s however, you may find iMovie a little limiting.

EDIT: something i forgot to mention,
Ive actually found CS4 to be far more stable generally under OSX than windows. Is your system setup correctly ? Are you running enough ram? latest updates?

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Eric Monroe]

I just edited a 4 camera production 2 hours long in ppro on a little 13″ macbook pro with only 2 gigs of ram, and this thing powered through like a champ with ZERO issues. I even accessed all 130 gigs of raw footage from a firewire 800 external drive. I am thoroughly impressed with the Mac’s ability with CS4.

I authored and burnt 57 discs out of encore, and had ZERO write failures. I have been running CS2 CS3 and CS4 for a few years now as a full time editor and i didnt notice any major differences in the PC to MAC versions of PPRO, or Encore. PPRO on the mac has a few less transitions so I have been told, but is obviously nothing i have missed in my workflow, because I haven’t noticed.

All in all, I will vote with Peter…there has to be something wrong with the machine you are on.

I am about to make the switch to macs because I have been so impressed by how well it runs adobe CS4.
I wouldn’t give up on it just yet……I have been a DIE-HARD PC guy for many moons….and my recent experience on Mac has changed my tune.

Good Luck!

Eric Monroe
Shadow Studios

[Mark Onat]

yes, iMovie is clearly a limited program, but it captures from HDV far, far more efficiently than Premiere CS4. Someone in the Adobe forums just confirmed that Premiere does not have access to the part of OSX that does scene autodetect, so Premiere flat out does not have it on the mac. I know purists will capture everything, and then cut, and I crop most every cut eventually, but I really like the auto cuts, and, yes, they are accurate.

You dont really need more than four dissolves, but the fact remains that PPro CS4 has about one third the amount of transitions and effects that the PC version has, and this is also documented, and something Adobe fails to tell people. Also, none of these shortcomings has been addressed in the updates, last one May 09.

I’ve also just discovered that PPro wont export HDV QT. It just doesnt do it, also confirmed on another video site.

iMovie DOES have live onscreen viewing during capture.

Premiere does capture HDV in MPEG2, native format, which is a huge advantage over the mac in terms of storage of raw footage, being about a third or less of the size. Premiere does not crash, and AME works fine, although I’ve heard of people having highly irregular export quality on the mac.

Encore was thoroughly unimpressive. I dont even want to remember all the problems I had in it.
I actually appreciated the customisation possible in it, but it never worked, and every other method of burning DVDs from iDVD to Toast works without any hitch. I guess it could be my three-year old Pioneer DVD burner. Oh no.

These are just impressions, and combined with what Adobe did to the Web Gallery function (moved it to Bridge and destroyed it) I’ve just tired of being in that environment, other than AE and Flash. AE is where I was doing most of my video manipulation anyway, so I’ll be there…

[Eric Monroe]

I am really sorry to hear that you have had such a horrible experience…..to the contrary I have had a grerat experience for the most part, I mean I have had a few little things go worng, but I havent had any of the issues you have described….so unfortunately I cant be of much help.

Hope it gets better for you.