Adobe has surprised those of us who have long been accustomed to a major release roughly every 18 months. Just a year after launching the CS5 titan, they announced not only a new version of the Creative Suites, but a new release schedule and a subscription option for their suites. The just-released CS 5.5 is an incremental version that provides improvements in 5.0’s first-generation 64 bit features, several cool new tools, and one of the most asked-for changes to the suite’s software line up: the return of Adobe Audition.

For our third article in a series covering Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, we’ll take a brief look at the advantages of Premiere Pro when working with contemporary HD video formats, specifically the tapeless acquisition systems offered by Canon, Sony and Panasonic. That’s followed by some user testimonials culled from our online discussion groups involving some of our DVi community members who have switched or are in the process of transitioning to Premiere Pro from other video editing programs. Then we’ll look at hardware options for configuring a desktop system or a mobile editing laptop using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

As a follow-up to Pete Bauer’s recent DVi feature article Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Six Months Later, we’re presenting a collection of user tips, editing tricks, and a couple of notes regarding RAM and operating systems designed to assist your transition into Premiere Pro. Culled from various Premiere Pro discussions from within our own Adobe CS5 forum, this article takes the golden nuggets that might have been harder to find on their own from within the myriad topics on our site and presents them all together here in an easy-to-read abridged format (including links pointing to each original thread, in case you want to dive in to any particular point and explore it more thoroughly). Whether you’ve already made the switch or just recently upgraded from a previous version of Premiere Pro, or even if you’re still just thinking about it, we hope you’ll find it useful.

Does anybody out there think their computer is just too fast? Wish you’d have bought a slower one? Doubt it! There’s no such thing as a computer that’s too fast. The better configured your system is, the more capability you’ll gain from PPro for your multi-stream HD editing. I think realistically you’ll really want an i7 and all the DDR3 RAM you can cram in your system, as well as the right video card (more on that later). While naturally Adobe isn’t going to reveal their secret recipes, it appears that PPro holds as many frames in RAM as it can – which is a lot more with 64 bit addressing – using only as a last resort the much slower temp/preview files and the swap file on the hard drive.