When CC became mandatory, I was very vocal here about not wanting to go along with what I saw as a draconian measure by Adobe. I did not like, and am still very wary of this idea.

So what says the herd? Is it working? Is it worth the money? Anyone ever get trapped with it not working when you needed it?

Maybe I am starting another flame war or didn't search enough for old discussions but I would like new opinions based on 2015.

Thank you

Les, I certainly can't answer your questions about whether CC is working in 2015 but given that from where I stand, there is little other choice - I'm preparing to order a special order iMac to run it on as the support for newer codecs and formats is becoming increasingly difficult to find and Adobe seem to be the best at staying current. Of course, my 4 year old iMac running FCP7.0.3 and Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium isn't being dismantled or sold for parts either...

Like you, I hope stability CAN be found with CC.

I am still using CS6 and so I am starting to see some issues with not keeping up too. This is why I ask. MY other NLE of choice is Vegas. It does what I want for most things but for some more "advanced" things I think need to get more onto Premier/AE. But if the consensus here is not great on CC then I might move to something else completely.

I've seriously considered Edius if I was prepared to jump ship to PC.

For me, it's completely worth it. I haven't had any trouble running it on a 2010 iMac. For everything I do, it just works. It's one less thing for me to worry about.

I was very hesitant at first about their new pricing structure as well.

I've been on it for not quite a year and am absolutely loving it. The $50/mo is a hit, especially when you combine it with all the other monthly bills like Vimeo, SmugMug, and Animoto... it works out to a couple hundred bucks a month that comes due every month. So I basically have to book 1 wedding a year just to pay account fees.

Anyways, on the Adobe thing, having full access to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Speedgrade, Muse, and Acrobat.... it's worth it to me. I'm so embedded into my Adobe workflow that something very disruptive such as a doubling or tripling of the monthly fee would have to happen in order for me to even begin to consider leaving the ecosystem.

I've been on CC from day one and it has been frictionless for me.
Everything works well, stays updated, and has been stable.
I'm still using a 5 year old Win 7 64, Intel i7, 24 GB RAM machine and see no need to replace it yet...
Looking at my past upgrade habits, I'm sure I spent close to $500-$600 per year on Adobe product upgrades for many years- so I'm not really seeing a lot of extra expense, and am truly having a happier experience.

I think Adobe pulled the rug from underneath the feet of those who had a single price product and were forced into a monthly billable product.

Nice to hear most people are pleased with the results. I grew up on Adobe, but may soon move to Edius. Vegas is nice but falls short of the Premiere capabilities.

I'm gonna be the one swimming upstream against the tide. I don't like
monthly subscription payments. I just don't. I remember friends that 'leased'
cars instead of buying one. They told me they always 'needed' a new car so
even if they bought one, they'd just trade it in, in a year or two so they
just lease. They have basically resigned themselves to having a car payment
every month for the rest of their lives. That's what CC reminds me of.
Someone who 'needs' each and every update of every program Adobe
makes.....so they just pay monthly. I've never been that person. In 2009
when the economy crashed, the thing that kept me in business when others
were failing, is that I live beneath my means as much as possible. Keep
those monthly bills as low as possible, In fact, I have never even taken a
business loan out. I've got FC Studio 7. I've got CS6. And I've got FCP X
with Motion and Compressor. I can get by with those. Moving forward, I will
probably be going FCP X/Motion and use good old Photoshop
CS6 for graphics stuff. Shooting with a FS700 (haven't upgraded that
to a FS7 either). I also have an iPhone 4 and a 2001 Isuzu Trooper. :)
Sometimes it's good to remember that every time something new comes
out we don't have to buy it......or 'rent' it as the case may be.....

Well, CC 2014 isn't stable for me. My problems aren't problems that a majority of Adobe's customers have, but I can see by threads on Creative Cow and elsewhere that I'm not the only one. Main issues include: frequent crashes (and having to restore from autosaves); and weird flickering generated on rendering that have cost me days of work to resolve (redoing projects from scratch).

So, I'm in two minds. CS6 worked fine. CC worked fine, and I love the warp stabiliser. I've seen many features on CC 2014 that look good to me, including the ability to apply effects at the Project level that trickle down to all clips, and the new morph cut and grading functions. But I can't yet use them!

I had enormous issues with CC2014.1 on my new Mac Pro - details on this thread.

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/525067-adobe-premiere-ae-cc-2014-issues-resolved.html

CC2014.2 has been a lot more stable. I still get some bugs and the occasionally crash but nothing (so far) that I have not been able to work around (quickly, but often requiring closing a project and then opening an auto-saved one, or previous edit version, again...sigh).

Meanwhile, CS6 on my old Mac Pro is pretty much a solid, totally stable and feature rich workhorse...so far none of my cameras/codecs I use have needed anything newer (but that might change shortly as I have my eye on some new 4K cams!)

Is CC worth it - yes, to a point and some of the new features are great (and some not so great/a step backwards...keying etc. with blue markers rather than golden yellow ones is horrible...).

Bottom line - when I stop qualifying for the first 12 months reduced monthly rental fee (as a legacy Adobe Production Premium CS6 license holder) then I'm still undecided if I'll continue with CC...meanwhile I'm trying to find time to learn FCPX (which I also have on the new Mac Pro). Main reason is this Adobe "rental model" - I just don't like it!

I am still using CS6 and so I am starting to see some issues with not keeping up too. This is why I ask. MY other NLE of choice is Vegas. It does what I want for most things but for some more "advanced" things I think need to get more onto Premier/AE. But if the consensus here is not great on CC then I might move to something else completely.

I'm also on CS6 as I'm not into renting.

Thing to look at is the newly released DaVinci Resolve 12 (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve). Looks like it does most of the standard stuff that CS6 does, with color correction capabilities well beyond CS6. It actually looks like it does multi-cam editing nearly the same way.

No doubt there are a bunch of little differences in capabilities. No doubt the workflows will be different, and thus there are learning curves to climb. But if you don't like to rent, this new version of Resolve certainly looks like a viable answer to Adobe. And if color correction / grading is a big thing for you, it's probably an easy choice to make. When I get to the end of the line for CS6 (for example, buy a camera with a CODEC that CS6 can't read), Resolve is probably my next NLE.

I don't care for the "creative chains" either so I'm also looking at DaVinci Resolve as a viable program change once CS6 no longer meets my needs. Resolve seems to need higher end computers but hopefully in a year or two that will not be as big of a deal. I'm very impressed with the speed that Blackmagic Design is developing the program.

Last year, I was hoping to try Resolve 11 out as they had added edit functionality to it.
I decided I would edit a whole project in it. But I quickly changed my mind as it could not
play video and audio in realtime. I really liked the look of it, it was like FCP X but
with tracks (yeah I'm one of those people who likes tracks, but I hate the monthly
payment more than I hate not having tracks, so I'm stuck with FCP X for now).
So for Resolve 12 to be a big step up over Resolve 11, they have to have improved
the speed. It's edit engine was just dirt slow and really you couldn't do much of
anything as far as editing in it. I'm guessing they did it, as they have put in
features such as multicamera, and to edit multicamera, you kind of need to be playing
several streams of video at once, while you choose which camera to 'take' in realtime.
I'm looking forward to the Resolve release in July!!

I was very vocal about how I would never do a subscription based service, but for two years now I'm very happy!

I'm not at all a fan of being held hostage with a rental license but I'm getting ready to commit to the 12 months at a discount as a CS owner before the offer ends in May and then will likely drop my subscription to Premiere-only after that as I still have fully functional CS5.5 Prod. Premium here.

CC works well and if you do the math, you end up spending less and being always current. It isn't a static world.

It's no longer viable to develop the kind of professional software unless you have some other side hardware that is subsidising it. No one is going to buy an Adobe phone/tablet/laptop, so this is the only move that makes sense. And, frankly, I appreciate the architecture improvements that the new model has opened up, without it always having to be something of whiz-bang feature that looks good in a demo in order to sell new versions.

Even Microsoft is having to go this route with Office. I'll be very surprised if you can obtain the new 2014 Mac Office without being on Office 360.

If you like what Adobe is doing then you should support them financially, just like any other business. If not, there are alternatives, and you can ride them until we shake out whether subsidized software via hardware can continue for the long term.

I appreciate the architecture improvements that the new model has opened up, without it always having to be something of whiz-bang feature that looks good in a demo in order to sell new versions.

A respectfully dissenting opinion:
Most editors that earn a living from editing I have known over the past 17 years will tell you that they buy a new machine pretty much every time they upgrade (or make significant internal upgrades in the case of a tower) before upgrading/updating their edit software and then strive to find the perfect balance of productivity and reliability and then STOP updating to maintain a "mission critical" edit bay.

My first owned edit bay was FCP1.0.2 under OS8.6 (later updated to FCP1.2.5 under OS9.1) on a Mac 450MHz B&W G3 that I ran for 6 years. After 4 years I installed a client copy of FCP2 and ran that (he transferred the license to me) until I EOL'ed that Mac and bought a white iMac in 2004/5 (FCS2) and ran it until 2011 when I bought FCS(3) and a new iMac which now runs FCP7 and PP CS5.5 side by side.

It's a business decision.

I paid $1600 for FCP1.0.2.
$800 for the upgrade to FCS2
$300 used for FCS(3)
$800 for CS5.5 Production Premium on the crossgrade plan for Apple users.

In other words, I happily paid the up front price to legally own the software I purchased in the version that worked for me. I regularly skip a good number of versions which add features I don't need or that "break" that delicate hardware/software balance that video editing software has due to its need to lever major hardware resources. In fact, I bought the 2011 iMac SOLELY because Lion was expected to break Final Cut Studio (which it did to varying degrees - LiveType and other apps stopped working).

I understand that Adobe has decided that my needs don't align with theirs but I would respectfully suggest that it isn't MY business's responsibility to help financially support Adobe's continued R&D on new products, ESPECIALLY when it is obvious they are moving heavily into online marketing solutions based on the sheer number of emails (unsolicited, by the way) I receive on a nearly daily basis telling me how much they can do for me to market my business...

I may have no choice to jump to CC subscription but I don't like it and it doesn't work for me.

I'm one of those who was vehemently against the principle of having to rent software instead of owning a perpetual licence. So naturally I refused to upgrade beyond CS6.

If anything, it's been a pleasant relief to be off the Adobe upgrade treadmill.

Apart from the better integration with SpeedGrade and being able to apply colour alteration profiles directly to clips on the timeline, I really don't feel as if I am missing out on anything. I can still get my work done just as well as ever. I've got a pretty dang current camera (Sony PMW-300), I shoot to 50Mbit XDCAM and edit away just nicely. What's not to like about that?

I've obviously saved money during the last two or more years. You could think of this as being what enabled me to purchase a copy of Izotope RX4 which is an insanely magical piece of audio repair software. Bang for buck, it's a better improvement to my post-production abilities than anything Adobe could have delivered.

Because I purchased as part of Adobe's volume licencing programme I've had a number of emails from a rep encouraging me to purchase upgrades whilst some special pricing is on offer. I've always politely replied that the subscription model is actually why we have suspended all expenditure on Adobe software and this will only change when a perpetual licence option becomes available again.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to get my work done.

Andrew

An advantage of CC for me is that I edit in multiple locations on multiple machines, both Windows and Mac. I currently keep CC loaded on five machines, but only activate two at a time. The PP and AE features I use have not changed much since CS6, but with CS6 I had to choose either Widows or Mac. I went to CC when it was first available, as I was moving my home office to Mac at the time; I've had essentially no problems with CC on either platform - it's very stable and reliable.

This subscription model works for some and doesn't work for others, In my particular case it would not work and cost much more then just to buy one time and keep using for as long as I need.

I have been using premiere up to cs3, then switched to edius 5 because cs3 didn't support avchd and I didn't want to go to cs4 because I had quite a lot of stability issues with cs3. The reason why such a subscription model would not work for me is that I intend to use a software program as long as it can support my workflow. I"m also such a person that likes to have a "mission critical" edit bay like Shaun described, I don't have the latest edius 7.5 version because I had some stability issues but instead am running a 7.3 version which is rock solid on my pc with windows 7 and can handle any codec, including raw DNG's from my bmpcc and 4k codecs from sony and panasonic camera's.

I don't see any reason right now to upgrade/update anymore as long my current setup can handle my workflow, this could mean I could be using the same set up for at least another 2 to 3 years without having to spend more then the upgradecost from 6.5 to 7 I paid 1,5 year ago and when I buy a new pc in 2 year with the latest version of edius 8 I can still use my old pc with edius 7.

Because I don't plan to update to every new version that comes along this would be much cheaper for me then paying a fixed amount every month again + once I would stop paying I don't own anything.

I may have edited a thing or two as well over the last 17 years that my sole source of income was video production... nothing overblown around the "danger" when you hear about each update "breaking" support for things or causing system instability for numerous users. If you don't need the update, why update? "Legacy" support seems to be waning (personally observation here... I can't give you hard facts and figures) with each subsequent update, not just with Adobe but Apple et al as well, as regards OS support and hardware support.

As a percentage of their initial purchase price, my edit bays have been the most lucrative investments I have made. I'm willing to reinvest in the things that make a difference to stability and productivity but not to a company that is requiring me to constantly "go to the well" except under duress. And I'm not there yet.

Once you get the software dialed in where you want it, you don't need bug fixes. In my experience "bug fixes" introduce more bugs than they "fix". I am now a CC editor, only because there is nothing better. In my experience, that leaves a lot of room in the field, and I expect new, better software in the next year or two. Much like when FCP came on the field. I look forward to it.

In my experience "bug fixes" introduce more bugs than they "fix"

My experience as well, there is a reason why I won't update past edius 7.3 right now, 7.4 is causing numerous crashes on my pc while 7.3 has been rock solid so far, go figure. 7.4 also has "bug fixes"...

A update would only be interesting to install if it contains new features that would benefit my workflow but if that is not the case I rather have older version installed that has a proven reliability.

If you've never had an update serious break something I can see why you might think it's archaic not keep everything up to date. A few years back Apple sent out a security update to their operating system that changed Quicktime which unbeknownst to me made any video recorded with a Firestore incompatible. At the time I had no idea why all my videos no longer worked and what was the cause. It took me over a week of countless hours of nightmarish stress troubleshooting and the fixing the problem.

There is always a possibility that a update will affect the stability of the program and it's always specifically related to each and every single pc configuration, if you follow any NLE forum every new update results in users complaining something weird is going on while other users never have a problem. To find out why you have a problem is often like finding a needle in a haystack, it can be a driver issue or another program causing a conflict or maybe it's hardware related.

But if you have a working updated system without any issues and if you then decide to disconnect it from the internet and don't update the OS and programs anymore as long as it supports your workflow you will have a much higher possibility of having a very stable system, something I have experienced over the past 10 years. For internetstuff I have a separate pc and my editing system only gets connected to the net if I really have to (for instance if I want to continue to use tmpgenc software which does require a internet connection once in a while to function.)

I was a regular updater of Premiere (5, 6, 6.5, CS1.5, 2, 4, 5, 5.5, 6), Audition (CS1, 1.5, 2, 3, 5, 5.5, 6), and Photoshop (CS2, 5, 5,5, 6). So I put plenty of ££££ in Adobe's coffers over the years, and did my bit to support development.

Their forced move to renting, with no prospect of ever being able to obtain a permanent licence at any point, cut off my subsidy of their software development.

I am able to use my Canon XA20 (AVCHD 1080p50) and EX3 without problem, as well as my Olympus Pen E. So I feel no pain.

Indeed my forgoing the extra, unwanted by me, gizmos enabled me to upgrade my tripod system from mid-market Manfrotto to upmarket Sachtler, and my ancient Sony V1E to a rather less ancient EX3.

Adobe's loss is other manufacturers' (and my) gain!

Since I ditched my Matrox MXO2 my system has been rock-solid.

Interestingn angle that has arisen on the upgrade decision making.

With perpetual licence upgrades we could essentially vote with out feet when it came to the next version of your CS software and the features / benefits being offered.

With CC rental (typically in yearly purchases for the best pricing) you're already committed to paying for whatever they produce.

Andrew

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.

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 (http://www.wired.com/2010/09/first-sale-doctrine/), 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).

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.

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.

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 (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/profile.php?do=ignorelist)

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.