Adobe offers 50% off CS5.5 to Final Cut Pro customers

[Roger Averdahl]

Originally Posted by Sean Seah

Wow that is attractive... i hope the folks outside of the US could enjoy the offer too.

Yes, the offer it's worldwide: The Genesis Project : Backing up Adobe’s commitment to Pro’s – making it easy to switch

...this offer is WORLDWIDE, so no one is being left out!"

Promo Code: SWITCH

Originally Posted by Walter Brokx

And now I wonder whether a loyal Adobe user could get 50% off CS5.5 as well :-p

Yes per the Terms and conditions, depending of what Adobe product you own today: Terms and conditions

[Arnie Schlissel]

Avid has a similar "crossgrade" program that they just extended.

I'd recommend anyone who's serious about their career in post production to take advantage of the cross grades. Not necessarily to "jump ship", but as an opportunity to expand your toolset & skillset.

[Ray Bell]

Just so you all know....

I just tried to use the promo code SWITCH for Adobe Production Suit CS 5.5 (upgrade)....

the promo code didn't work, contacted Adobe direct and they say.. no, they will not honor upgrades,
they only want FCP converts...

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

Just remember to add the sales tax to the quoted US figures.

Just to avoid confusion, in my post i compared both download-only prices, and both without VAT.

[Olof Ekbergh]

Originally Posted by Ray Bell

Just so you all know....

I just tried to use the promo code SWITCH for Adobe Production Suit CS 5.5 (upgrade)....

the promo code didn't work, contacted Adobe direct and they say.. no, they will not honor upgrades,
they only want FCP converts...

Upgrades are $399 from 5.0 no discount.

[David Knaggs]

Just wondering. Because CS5.5 is optimised to run best on Nvidia cards (CUDA), which don't come as standard with Macs, this has meant that you can only get best performance using a Mac Pro. Too bad if you are using a MacBook Pro or an iMac.

However, with the new Thunderbolt ports on MBPs and iMacs, I was wondering if it's possible to put a Nvidia card into some sort of enclosure and hook it up to a Thunderbolt port. Would OS X recognise it? Would PPro5.5 be able to recognise and fully leverage its CUDA capabilities even though it is not installed internally?

This would be a really big deal, if possible. (In view of the incredibly tempting offer of 50% off.)

Anybody tried it already?

Anybody know?

(Any Adobe representatives care to chime in?)

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by David Knaggs

Just wondering. Because CS5.5 is optimised to run best on Nvidia cards (CUDA), which don't come as standard with Macs, this has meant that you can only get best performance using a Mac Pro. Too bad if you are using a MacBook Pro or an iMac.

However, with the new Thunderbolt ports on MBPs and iMacs, I was wondering if it's possible to put a Nvidia card into some sort of enclosure and hook it up to a Thunderbolt port. Would OS X recognise it? Would PPro5.5 be able to recognise and fully leverage its CUDA capabilities even though it is not installed internally?

This would be a really big deal, if possible. (In view of the incredibly tempting offer of 50% off.)

Anybody tried it already?

Anybody know?

(Any Adobe representatives care to chime in?)

For hardware acceleration WITHOUT a nvidia card, the Matrox Mini with Max is what you need.

Last I checked, Adobe had 2 discounted offers: one for switchers and one for anyone with any version of Photoshop or After Effects going back several versions (I think PS CS2 or AE 7). The upgrade was around $1100 but discounted $200-300. Check Videoguys.com as I saw it there. They also have a great promotion to get Avid MC 5.5 and Adobe CS5.5 together for ~$1700.

[David Knaggs]

Thanks, Steve. But I would never buy a Matrox product again after my experience with the Matrox MXO.

Hence my question about whether it's possible to hook up a NVIDIA card externally through Thunderbolt.

Anybody know?

[Steve Kalle]

Hi David,

I don't blame you one bit. After my experience with the MXO2 Mini, I will never purchase anything from them again.

To your main question: I know that it is possible to do what you want with the Expresscard slot. The key is whether or not the TB ports have direct access to the PCI Express.....AND I just googled it and the answer is YES. On the MBP, the TB connection has access to a PCIe x4 in addition to the Displayport.
Intel Thunderbolt: a closer look (updated with video) -- Engadget

Now, you just need to wait for a company to release the external case for holding a video card. However, the downside could be cost. I can't recall the product, but someone released an external video card case designed to connect via the Expresscard slot, and I don't think it was cheap (around $200 maybe not including the video card).

[David Knaggs]

Thanks, Steve.

That's very good to know. Right now, I'm planning out my hardware/software roadmap for the next 24 months and am currently leaning towards the scenario of running a pimped-out new iMac as a "two-car garage" with FCP and Production Premium CS5.5 side-by-side. And running an externally enclosed Nvidia graphics card through a Thunderbolt port for optimum CS5.5 performance (if possible).

Oddly enough, the cessation of DVD Studio Pro is a real tipping point for me. What if a future OS update "breaks" it? I need a pro authoring solution for DVDs (the ability to author a large number of "stories" plus complex menu structures) and would prefer something with a future roadmap and that will be supported if future OS bugs occur. Hence Encore is looking more and more like a "must-have". And it's the same thing with Soundtrack Pro ...

I'm really liking what FCP X can do (I'm slowly working my way through the Steve Martin tutorials at the moment) and want to stay with that roadmap too, as they hopefully update it with enough features to make it viable to use on a paying job. But I'm thinking of dropping "classic" FCP as soon as possible and open old FCP projects with PPro5.5.

Then I can decide the most efficient and productive workflow to use on a project-by-project basis (FCP X or PPro).

I feel that Apple have cut down my options with their EOL (end-of-line) of a number of FCS applications. The appeal of this 50% off CS5.5 deal is that it will fully restore my options. And I like that. I'll make my final decision in a few weeks and part of that will hinge, for me, on this external Nvidia graphics card idea.

Steve has found that the Thunderbolt spec will support it. I guess it just now depends on a vendor making a graphics card case with Thunderbolt connection and then someone putting it to the acid test and making sure that the OS and PPro5.5 both "play nice" with it.

[Brian Parker]

David I suggest you read up on what exactly will be sped up by having a CUDA card. Most of CS5s mercury improvements work using the RAM and CPU so you don't necessarily need one. A CUDA card will only help on h.264 encoding and maybe some rendering of specific effects. A decently spec'd imac with a ton of ram might be all you need though.

I edit on a mac pro without a CUDA card and everything works better in CS5 compared to previous versions. Dynamic link is more stable now that CS apps can utilize all the machine's RAM, and my Canon 7D footage plays back perfectly.

[Pete Bauer]

Definitely do your research -- and try before you buy with Adobe's 30 day free trial -- but I would suggest that you do seek a hardware solution that allows you to take advantage of CUDA. Brian's right that CS5.5 processes the timeline very efficiently even without CUDA, but I can't imagine that any of us in the pro editing realm really edits a major project without using effects.

And that's where CUDA really shines. It isn't just a few obscure effects, but 39 or so of the most commonly used transitions and effects, PLUS the fixed effects like motion (scaling, positioning, rotation), opacity, and the blend modes (eg overlay, additive):

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premiere...A65A9AC80.html

I usually can do a whole project, color correction, transitions, etc using only the CUDA accelerated effects and therefore never see a background render during the entire edit. If I do have a need for a CPU-intensive, non-accelerated effect, I can just tweak the effect and either render it once or disable it until I'm ready to export.

So my opinion is that even if your system can't do CUDA, PPro will still perform very well, but if at all possible, do go CUDA.

[Nigel Barker]

Is the Adobe Premiere CS5.5 30-day trial a fully functional version? I downloaded the CS5 trial version when it came out & discovered that it was missing crucial CODECs e.g. H.264 for the Canon DSLRs so it was useless for evaluating the claims of being able to edit H.264 natively.

The only affordable CUDA enabled card for the Mac Pro is the now discontinued Nvida GTX 285 which can only occasionally be found for sale used. The vast majority of GTX 285 cards that you find for sale on eBay are not genuine Mac cards but PC ones that have been flashed with hacked firmware to enable them to be used in a Mac Pro although AFAIK there is no issue with using a re-flashed PC card.

[Bart Walczak]

CS 5.5 trial is fully functional except Encore, which will not open in trial mode.

You might also try to look for hacked GTX460 for Mac. I remember seeing it somewhere on the net, but don't remember the place.

[Pete Bauer]

If you're installing Production Premium or Master Collection, there are also some third party After Effects features that aren't available in the trial: Mocha, Keylight, CycoreFX, Color Finesse LE, ProEXR, and Digieffects FreeFrom.

But for PPro, as Bart said, everything is there and working except Encore won't open in the trial. They have changed this from previous versions that didn't contain MPEG2 codecs. See also my short article on CS5.5:

A Spring Surprise from Adobe: CS5.5 at DVInfo.net