After 3 years, is CC working? Worth it?

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Alan Craven

I'm with you there Andrew, except that you are not actually paying "FOR" it - you are paying merely for the "USE" of it during that particular twelve month period. In my view there is a major, insurmountable, difference between those two concepts.

But that's not new with CC. Courts have already interpreted EULAs to be simply a license to use the software, not actually purchasing the software itself, a year before Creative Cloud was a thing. The only difference is how you pay (you're paying by month to Adobe instead of by month the credit card company for your $2600 purchase).

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Les Nagy

Maybe I am starting another flame war

:D, well not exactly flame war but not exactly the kind of discussion you where waiting for I guess.

Eventhough I don't use Premiere CC I think your choice whether you should upgrade is pretty simple, from what I have read so far CC is stable for some users and not so stable for others, this looks like a situation like you can have with any other NLE as there can be many software or hardware related conflicts so this should not really be something that should influence your decision, if you want to have a stable system you can buy a workstation that is certified to work with Premiere.

I am still using CS6 and so I am starting to see some issues with not keeping up too

In this case you need to find out if the current CC provides what you need that CS6 doesn't support, if that is the case I see no reason why not to upgrade to CC?

I am not sure how the subscription program exactly works but is it not possible to get a one month subscription? If you would get a project where you need features cs6 doesn't provide you can just pay and use CC for the time of that particular project and after that return to CS6 for your other projects?

But no doubt there will come a time you will have no other choice then switch, like when you use camera's that have codecs cs6 doesn't support, if you cannot find other solutions that will match a Premiere/aftereffects/photohop kind of integration, if that what is important for you, you will have to move into CC anyway, whether you like it subscription model or not.

[Gary Huff]

Here's my straight up opinion on the current Creative Cloud 2014 suite. This is coming from someone who started editing on Premiere 5.0 and has used practically every version up until now. Also includes Media 100, Sony Vegas, and Final Cut 5-7 (all with projects taken from initial ingest to final rendering). My current NLEs are Apple FCPX and Premiere CC 2014.

I have been on Creative Cloud since the first year it was available with CS6. Then I took a year off before jumping back on with CC and then now CC 2014. It's definitely not been without growing pains, but I seem to have less issues than a lot of other people. I think some technical niggles still show up with payments or whatnot, but that's really to be expected on a system overhaul like this, and as a counter-point to that, I had an issue where I needed to pull down FCPX from the App Store on a new system on the day that the App Store went down (had to move over to a different system entirely that already had it installed), so it's not only Adobe who has those kinds of issues.

I use Behance to run my website. I had been looking for something for a while that would be easy enough to put together a simple template to look nice without requiring me to delve into coding or purchasing hosting and a Wordpress template, and it seemed to fit the bill. It's free with my CC subscription. It's otherwise $100/year, so that's some added value to my subscription.

I don't use the Cloud drive. Dropbox has been reliable and works great, so I'm reluctant to move stuff over to that (plus, Dropbox Pro gives far more space). It would be a killer deal if Adobe just gave a Dropbox Pro account with CC like they give you a Behance ProSite account with your subscription, but I doubt that will ever happen.

The Fonts library is really nice and has saved my bacon twice already this year.

As for the apps, it really depends on what you need and what you struggle with. Take Photoshop for example. Photoshop CC 2014, for a light user such as myself who uses it for photo retouching every once in a while, doesn't strike me as being that much different from a casual level than Photoshop CS6. Most of my photographic work is within Lightroom, which is available standalone.

Illustrator also seems relatively unchanged, but I only use that to convert files from clients that were created into Illustrated into YUV PSDs.

Audition CC 2014 feels pretty similar to all the previous versions of Audition I have used.

After Effects CC 2014 feels snappier, and while I don't use it, some of my friends really like that Cinema4D integration. I mostly use AE for generating animated logos, lower thirds, and for doing video touch-ups, so a lot of that functionality has been in there for a while. I do like the "under-the-hood" performance tweaks, and very interested to see what this year's release does for that.

Premiere CC 2014 is the most different, probably because I am in it far more and at a deeper level. I do like the GUI change, it feels more responsive to me, especially with 4K material for some reason (I found that FCPX 10.1 would start to lag heavily, but with the new 10.2 and with Beauty Box 4, a plugin that exacerbated the situation I'm interested to feel the difference). The addition of Adjustment Layering and the Lumitri effects have been what I utilize the most, and feel like I can keep a lot of the work I do totally within Premiere itself without having to send to Speedgrade or Resolve to do things (especially with the Colorista III plugin that I added). Relinking is also amazing. I took a CS5.5 project I had edited with Cineform transcodes (from Canon 60D QuickTime H.264s) and relinked to the original clips. I had originally done the color with Cineform's metadata tools, so I have to tweak the color correction with Colorista, but it all worked flawlessly and only took about an hour to do.

The biggest problem I have with Premiere right now is using CUDA. It's simply unstable on a Mac, and some older plugins also seem to be problematic with it. I don't know about CUDA performance on Windows, but I think it's the CUDA drivers themselves that are the issue because I routinely get all kinds of weird image glitches even outside of Premiere (my MacBook Pro has the 750M GPU). This probably won't be an issue for the next go 'round of MacBook Pro 15" because I bet it will have an AMD GPU instead, and the rest of the line is NVIDIA free, but it's something to be aware of. OpenCL mode has no issues.

I think the biggest tell about Creative Cloud is this year's update. CC was a nice upgrade to CS6, but nothing I felt was really mandatory for people to get onboard with. CC 2014 changed that, and CC 2015 looks like it will be a killer update in a variety of ways (I'm very excited about Premiere's new workspaces modes, more Lumiteri updates, and AE's push towards real-time performance). I also hope that Adobe can move off QuickTime and onto AVFoundation (which is not a sexy bullet point, but means a lot to me) for better ProRes performance.

My subscription lapses in November, but I feel no worry about canceling at any time if I become unhappy. I haven't gotten burned, I've had my apps lapse into trial period once when the call home couldn't connect at the right time because of no Internet, but everything works like it should and it resolves itself once the Internet is back. I'm not worried about canceling my subscription because I rarely go back to older projects outside of pulling raw assets from them, and I keep my projects very well organized. If I needed to ensure I could move a project to a totally different system, I'd be prepared to render out stems and export an XML of the project, and I feel that would get me 90% of the way there for the most part. I actually feel confident that I could pull a project from Premiere and into FCPX (though, I will be honest, I've been tempted to do the opposite before) though I haven't tested this yet.

[Chris Hurd]

A quick programming note:

You can expect this thread to receive the standard DVi quality control edit sometime (someday), so don't be surprised if some posts or parts of some posts are withdrawn from public view.

Once that's done, I'll re-open it for further replies. Meanwhile, for any member here who finds himself or herself sufficiently irked with a specific fellow member, may I please remind all of you about this simple, easy, and readily available option:

Edit Member Ignore List

Hope this helps. Let's give this thing a rest for the time being. Thanks,

[Chris Hurd]

I've thought about giving this topic a new title. It would be:

"After 3 years, is this thread working? Worth it?"

Let's find out.

[Andrew Smith]

Given that two years have passed, we should have some additional perspective on it with the benefit of hindsight. A few had noticed at one point that what they have paid out on a software rental basis would have paid for an upgrade or full product.

Andrew

PS. Thanks for resurrecting this thing.

[Gary Huff]

It's still working just fine for me. But then, I actually use the Adobe Creative Cloud software to create content that I get paid for, so my perspective is heavily biased.

[Andy Wilkinson]

Ditto Gary.

I was very wary of the subscription model but in fact it's worked well for me. Here is an update (and a change in position) from when I posted in this thread (on page 1) back in 2015.

I will say that once I got everything working well, I then deliberately "locked down" my Adobe CC at 2014 and the new (Trashcan) Mac Pro in Mavericks for over 2 years. Then, about a year ago, (and specifically because I NEEDED some of the newer features and because I had a rare window of opportunity (i.e. where I was not in the middle of any paid projects) I carefully updated to CC 2017 after a clean instal of Sierra, the then current OS.

Before attempting this, I created a couple of back up clones of my system with CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) in case I ever needed to go back. I did not. This exit system will now, no doubt, remain locked down with this "2017 system" for a good while longer - basically until I HAVE to upgrade for something important again.

You won't find me doing every little upgrade/tweak that Adobe issues - once I've got a working system that's it! I then stick with it rigidly - I can't afford to take any chances with some of my client work.

The other thing to mention is that soon after the switch to CC2017 on Sierra I had a regular, international corporate client ask me, at very short notice, to re-edit a big video project that I had created for them under the older CC2014 & Mavericks regime. I was a bit concerned... but in the end I need not have worried! Adobe handled the conversion to the newer project version with ease/without any drama whatsoever and I was able to deliver to the client rapidly - and got paid handsomely :-) .

So, for me, "it just works".

[Gary Huff]

You brought up a good point, Andy. I recently went back to render out masters of projects I haven't touched in 5-6 years, because I no longer needed the raw footage and didn't need it taking up space on my backup archives. I was able to easily upgrade CS4-CC projects to CC 2018 and mostly just needed to install some older plugin versions (like Colorista II vs IV and Cosmo instead of Cosmo 2) to get the edit exactly back to the way it was when I finished it.

I did run into an issue where Adobe dropped Dolby Digital exporting out of Premiere. I had a project setup with the 6 channels that I had used to export to a Blu-ray compatible DD track, but I needed to do a lower-bitrate version for DVD. It was rather easy to install CC 2015 (the version the project was made in), re-open the project, and export what I needed, then uninstall it. Didn't run into any issues doing that, and the option was right there to install it, not like having to find an optical disc and setup a drive to read it (and the time involved to install something that large from a disc), or find a download link, or open the archive where I saved the original download link. It was right there in the Creative Cloud app, and given that I was in a crunch to get 40 discs delivered, it was great that this issue was just a minor annoyance and not a total dealbreaker.

[Andy Wilkinson]

Good to know Gary, should I ever need to go back to some of my even older CS6 (or 5.5) projects, originally edited on my classic Mac Pro.

One of the secrets, as most will know, is making sure projects/all associated media is carefully archived in well labelled and structured master folders - and duplicates of those created in case a drive ever dies (we all learn that rule the hard way)...I have literally many dozens of Tetabytes of projects archived in HDDs stored in boxes all over the place.

Actually, I still occasionally use CS6 on this older cMP edit system - and Encore in that suite gets used fairly often as I have a few clients still needing DVD-Video discs...remember those! (although I know you can access Encore via a CC subscription, I just power up my cMP instead). By the way, that one is still locked down with Mountain Lion, after several years of Snow Leopard before that.

I’ve tinkered with FCPX, and it is certainly getting better, but the Adobe CC suite just seems to do what I want and I know my way around it pretty well now. I can work fast and effectively with it and it’s reliable. Yes, I know my Trashcan/RAID hardware can render files much faster with FCPX, but it’s still plenty fast enough with Adobe CC. And this is with the Sony XAVC-L UHD files I’ve been editing these last 2.5 years - which apparently are not that edit friendly. I never bother with proxie files.

My system just seems to handle it all very well with no issues :-)

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Andy Wilkinson

Actually, I still occasionally use CS6 on this older cMP edit system - and Encore in that suite gets used fairly often as I have a few clients still needing DVD-Video discs...remember those! (although I know you can access Encore via a CC subscription, I just power up my cMP instead). By the way, that one is still locked down with Mountain Lion, after several years of Snow Leopard before that.

I actually do run Encore, and did it just a few weeks ago to master DVDs for a movie that the director wanted to have on him as he attended the South by Southwest festival. It ran on Sierra just fine, I render out all the elements beforehand and just build the disc in Encore (I never liked the quality of Encore's presets anyway).

I’ve tinkered with FCPX, and it is certainly getting better, but the Adobe CC suite just seems to do what I want and I know my way around it pretty well now.

I like FCPX quite a bit, have a foot in both at the moment, but told a producer today that if I had to be stuck on a desert island with only one NLE, it'd be Premiere.

[Steven Davis]

Like others, I'm stuck with going with the CC since I migrated my iMac 2012 to my new iMac Pro. I already have learned most of FCPX which I bought, but have been frustrated with some of the non-intuitiveness.

So now I have the CC because I needed Photoshop and figured I would give Premiere a try.

I really didn't want to learn another editor, but some of the FCPX limitations are so annoying. As a decade-long Vegas user, FCPX feels like a software that was specifically created for skaters or surfers to edit small simple projects. Just my two cents.

I know Premiere has been around a long time and hope that it's a little deeper than FCPX. I also would like to compliment my video projects with AE.

I'm mainly thinking out loud here. But I enjoyed reading this thread.