Best new features/fixes is Premiere CS3?

[Graham Hickling]

For those of you on Windows machines who have upgraded from CS2 and have by now gotten familiar with CS3, I'd be interested to hear: what are the 3 or 4 changes that you feel have been of the most benefit for your day-to-day workflow?

[Jim Gunn]

CS3 works smoother with Aspect HD v.5 than previous versions. That is the most important change for me.

[Peter Ferling]

For me it hasn't been fun. I get a playback head that locks up or freezes on images if I have the preview monitor on the second PC monitor. Dragging the preview monitor to the primary display helps until the project grows to a moderate size. I have prospect 2k and am working with cineform on this. However, to keep working, I've imported my troubled project into an Adove HDV project in "desktop" mode setting. Some kind of D3D issue. Not sure.

Another issue is a titler that forgets it's screen settings and has to be constantly resized each time I open it.

Thirdly, the app installs without default keyboard shortcuts.

Adobe also removed some useful effects, such as green screen keys. They apparent want us to use AE a whole lot more, (yikes!). I don't mind AE for ten second FX shots that take a week to build. But not for long running clips that would render/edit forever in AE otherwise. I don't mind the application linking, but why even bother that route for something as simple as a greenscreen? (Opinion).

On a positive note, I do like the docked window layout, you can drag things around and other windows follow. You can also undock and do it the old way.

Importing and linking AE comps is cool, (overkill for greenscreen though.. I said that already, didn't I? Hmmm).

I've had mixed feelings. However, rendering/scrubbing from CS3 is improved over CS2 (i.e. it's not crashing every ten minutes). Just the annoying playback head the refuses to play is my beef. All this on a freshly installed quad opteron box with nothing else installed but updates and drivers.

[Graham Hickling]

Wow. Just 2 responses. Could mean various things:

- CS3 works so smoothly that people are spending time editing rather than hanging around forums like this
- there isn't much diff in a normal day between CS3 and CS2
- not many DVi folks on Windows machines have upgraded to CS3
- or.... what?

[Douglas Turner]

Improvements:

Crashes less than PPRO 2
Looks nicer
Adobe might actually support this release

Gripes:

Still crashes
Timeline marker not moving sometimes when scrubbing in preview screen
Offline media properties still doesn't state where the original clip resided (a pain when you have loads of CFHD0001-0012.avi clips and one has gone walkabouts)
Titler's panels all over the shop when opening
Forcing you to use Soundbooth as your sound editor (OK, so I could associate WAVs with Audition - but that's a pain)
Even when I've rendered my whole Cineform Aspect HD project, Premiere STILL has to render when exporting

...there are other problems, but I'm clueless as to whether they're Adobe, Cineform, Boris or Magic Bullet issues!

[Mark Morikawa]

time remapping the most appreciated improvement for me.

[Steve Wolla]

Premiere Pro CS3 crahes A LOT LESS than 1.5.1, I know that for sure. Does that count? That's super critical to me, as I do this editing thing for a living, and need system reliability first and foremost.

[Josh Allen]

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

titler that forgets it's screen settings and has to be constantly resized each time I open it

Definitely my biggest gripe about CS3 as well. Although I found that moving all the "pods" to the left hand side of the titler window has helped.

Things I like:
- Time re-mapping
- "Seems" more stable, although certainly still crashes
- "Fit" option for the preview window. When editing HDV I used to keep it at 50%, but that always seemed too small. The "fit" options take best advantage of available screen space.