Premiere pro CS3 vs CS5 is it worth the trouble?

[John Gerard]

Hi all,
I currently have a Dell 390 computer that is about 4years old. I am running premiere pro CS3. I wondered what your thoughts are on whether it is worth the effort to upgrade my system to 64bit to run CS5. I don't want to have to buy a totally new computer at this time. My Dell can run 64bit windows XP. I tried running Windows 7 on a Sony notebook single p4 2.8 chip and it ran ok but it is a little slow. Mainly the graphics card does not support all the new stuff in Windows 7. Currently my system is running stable for the most part. Every now and them encore crashes. But not that often. It did help cutting my projects into smaller chunks. As someone on this forum suggested. I have the NVIDA quatro FX 3500 graphics card. Xeon dual core 3ghz CPU and 4GB ram. I heard I would need at least 8GB RAM to run well under 64bit. RAMs cheep so that is not an issue. Windows in general is known for needing a lot of Ram and Hdd space that is unused. So whenever windows get low on memory/ Hdd space it starts to have problems.
Is CS5 that much better vs CS3?

Thanks,

John Gerard

[Peter Manojlovic]

Well, strictly from a money standpoint...
If you're happy with export times and workflows, and it's not bottlenecking your business, then why spend anymore money?
Unless you're forced to edit AVCHD natively, or needing MPE then perhaps CS5 isn't necessary...

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

stay with CS3. With your system the difference will be hard to notice. For CS3 to work properly, the recommended RAM is 12GB, among other things.

[Wesley Cardone]

I upgraded the memory in a mobo to its maximum of 8gb, installed Win7 to dual-boot with WinXP, and installed CS5. I sold the old memory on eBay for about 60% of what it sells for new. My PPro CS3 experiences are acceptable as I have no complaints. However, CS3 Encore has gone out to lunch. It started in late winter of this year and has now gotten to the point where Encore CS3 is not even usable. I even went to the trouble to reinstall everything from the ground up including the WinXP OS. It made no difference. Encore CS5, however, is smooth as silk.

I have not upgraded the video card to the Fermi line that CS5 likes so I don't think I can reasonably comment on performance differences between CS3 and CS5 except that PPro CS5 is reasonable to work with. PPro CS5 is also smooth as silk, though. Crashes are probably a little fewer with CS5 PPro.

I use Matrox RT.X2 which has not released drivers for CS5 PPro yet so I do my NLE work in CS3, export to m2v, and author in CS5. Matrox is scheduled to release CS5 drivers this month (October) but I'll wait until the dot release which will fix bugs.

[John Gerard]

Originally Posted by Sareesh Sudhakaran

stay with CS3. With your system the difference will be hard to notice. For CS3 to work properly, the recommended RAM is 12GB, among other things.

I don't quite understand your above commment. am I correct that Cs3 is only a 32bit program? If so, then under windows 32 I can only use about 3GB RAM. So I am not sure how I can use 12. That's my problem. I believe that cs3 would run better if I had 12GB RAM to use.
CS5 is a 64bit program and I could then add that much RAM to my current system. My current system is 64bit capable. My question again is whether it is worth the hassle to upgrade to CS5 without buying a complete new system. I currently have windows 7 both the 32bit and 64bit. My thinking is that I be better getting the Windows Xp 64bit. I think this might run better on my system. Better chance to have all the correct drivers for my system.

John Gerard

[Tim Kolb]

The 32 vs 64 bit discussion is a common source of confusion.

CS5 is a 64 bit program, you need a 64 bit system to run it.

However, 64 bit systems run 32 bit programs...quite nicely actually.

A 32 bit OS only sees 4 GB of RAM.

A 32 bit software application only sees 4 GB of RAM

On a 32 bit system, the OS takes what it needs and the apps that are running have to make due with what is left, On Windows, depending on whether you're using the common RAM 'hack', etc, oftentimes PPro may actually only have 1GB or less actually available to it...start another app (Media Encoder for instance) and slice that pie even thinner...

On a 64 bit system, let's say you install 16 GB of RAM...

Your 32 bit app can still only see 4 GB of course...BUT it actually can USE 4 GB. Suddenly PPro has its 4 GB, AE has its 4 GB, Photoshop has its 4 GB...and the OS has 4 as well.

CS3 in general was a fast and relatively stable set of software on 64 bit systems loaded with RAM. Most of the users I ran into who had CS3 issues had 32 bit systems and were trying to use multiple dynamic-linked AE comps in any given PPro project while exporting the sequence directly to Encore, etc, etc, etc... There just isn't enough juice there to alllow all those apps to run efficiently...page file becomes gargantuan...system falls over.

So...you will benefit from a big, fire-breathing 64 bit system, even if you stay with CS3.



However,

CS5 is a leap forward that is substantial for some workflows, and as of CS4, the ability to have sequences with different frame sizes and settings really added flexibility to the package. If you really utilize Premiere Pro for heavy duty work, CS5 is worth the leap.

(I am teaching a class on PPro CS5 on fxphd.com, which is typically the domain of high end applications like Nuke, Shake, Avid, etc... They have professors (their term for us) from organizations like WETA and Pixar... And they approached me about doing an intermediate level PPro class...it was so popular that it's running again this semester. I think it's safe to say CS5 is a different animal.)

I agree in principle with the poster who advised to hold steady if what you have works... Upgrading always takes time for adaptation...but if you're getting a new system anyway, keeping the old one running through the transition probably would be a way to smooth that out...

And keep in mind that software manufacturers are commonly only supporting the current release and one version back these days...it just isn't cost effective to manage older code than that. A lot has changed since CS3 and even software plugins are moving forward... So, there are some reasons to upgrade that aren't "shiny-object" oriented.

...something to consider.

[Ron Little]

I have a duel quad, with 12 gigs of ram, cuda enabled graphics card, 64 bit OS, raid work drive, four terabyte of storage, and I still manage to crash on a daily basis. I am so glade I upgraded yet again to Premiere. When will I ever learn.

[Ron Little]

Did I mention the Matrox mini? Did you know you can only use it during a matrox sequence. So glade I got that too.

[Tim Kolb]

???

Matrox, AJA, Black Magic... They all have their own sequence setings. so I'm unclear as to what makes the mini working with Matrox sequence settings unusual... The same basic premise exists in FCP with hardware I/O...

Have you tried PPro CS5 without the Matrox installed?

PPro CS5 is pretty stable overall... even on systems with no CUDA card.

[Ron Little]

Not so, on my old Matrox Parahelia card I could play windows media player on the external monitor.

[Tim Kolb]

Originally Posted by Ron Little

Not so, on my old Matrox Parahelia card I could play windows media player on the external monitor.

That is not a video I/O device like an AJA Kona card or Black Magic Decklink card...the Parhelia was a display card...not a video I/O card. I had one too. three VGAs out...big time for that time.

Matrox makes (or made) both display cards and video I/O cards. On the parhelia, there was no "external" monitor but the one display output you could change to feed a video monitor...NVIDIA had their Quadro 540s, etc, which were similar, but still only display cards. The Parhelia had no dedicated effects within any edit system, it was a display card like your Quadro card is in your new system..

The Mini has dedicated capture modes to specific codecs, augmented effects, all these things are only implemented on a sequence that uses the Matrox settings...it's the way I/O gear works.

So...it will affect how your editing runs... And the first step in troubleshooting problems is to eliminate something and see if things improve. Any third party card can add some quirks, particularly if there's some subtle hardware conflict that hasn't been encountered yet...

[Rob Morse]

PPro CS5 runs significantly better. My only problem is waiting for all the plug-ins to catch up.

[Ron Little]

I am glad you guys are having a good experience with CS5. I am just saying that has not been my experience. I spent a considerable amount of money on a new system built to run CS5 and have just not been that thrilled with it. It crashes daily. I will just have to live with it until I get the bugs worked out or something better comes along. I hear Vegas is a good program.
I get what you are saying about I/O gear. It would have been a nice touch if they would have made it work with windows media player.

[John Gerard]

I am only running CS3 as you know but I understand what you are saying when it comes to CS3 at least. I got a Dell system which I researched and researched what specs hardware I would need in order to run Premiere. In hind-site I would get a turnkey system if I decided to get a completely new system today. I found that Premiere is really tied to the type of hardware you are using and that includes having just the right drivers. Once I installed all the correct drivers for video card, etc. This helped a lot. So the drivers that run best for Premiere Pro may not necessarily be the latest drivers. And then having to go through my system to shut down every service in Windows that I don't need. That took a long time. Having this already done for me in a turnkey system would have been nice. Also, I got a good suggestion to brake up my project into smaller parts and that helped a lot. As we have been discussing here having a lot more RAM would probable help a lot. I keep getting memory low errors but I can't add any more ram until I make the jump to lightspeed, I mean 64bit. I am still thinking about that for a while. Since right now my system does not crash as much. It probably crashes 1 or 2 times in 2-3hours of use, or so. Lately it's mainly been crashing in encore CS3. I learned to save my work every few minutes just to be on the safe side. A pain in the butt. Also I finially got myself not to ever connect this system to the Internet. This makes it difficult when I want to install a new program or register a program like Premiere. I shouldn't need to do that very often.

John Gerard

[Jay West]

I second what Tim said above about running CS3 under Win 7 (or Vista 64). I add the following six comments to the intervening discussion.

1. First, for Ron Little and John Gerard and your "crashing" problems: have you tried cleaning the media cache database? An overfull, unattended media cache database can produce those symptoms. In CS4 and CS5, you click on Edit -->Preferences-->Media and then click "clean" next to the second item down. It has been a couple of years since I last used CS3, so I do not recall the exact keystrokes (and I can't find my CS3 manual) but I believe the process was similar.

Also, for Ron, if you are working with AVCHD when you are getting crashes, you might want to try an Adobe CS5 "AVCHD" sequence preset to see if the crashing issues persist.

2. Second: for John: before moving from Win XP to Win 7, check to be sure that there will not be any hidden hardware gotchas before getting and installing Win 7. Dell systems have a reputation for being finicky about this so you want to run the Microsoft Windows Upgrade Advisor. (Google it to find the free MS download site).

3. Also for John: as for whether it is worthwhile upgrading from CS3 to CS5, it ultimately depends a lot on what you edit and what you edit for. In addition to what Tim pointed out, I'll offer a few more specific things to consider.

Are you working mainly with SD video or are you mainly working with HD formats? If SD, stay with CS3. If you are using mostly HD video, I can say that. CS5 has been a very good thing for me. I do mostly mutli-cam editing with HDV and AVCHD, and also (like Tim) I happily use a Matrox Mini for an external display . I have found CS5 much preferable to CS3. While I've had to figure out some quirks and work-arounds, working with HD under CS5 has been as easy for me as working with SD under CS3. (Come to think of it, there were quirks and work-arounds there, too.)

If using HDV, do you use a third party capture utility like HDVSplit or Cineform's HDLink? These cure the audio synch problems that some CS3 users -- myself included --- had when using PPro CS3's own capture utility; a problem that has gone away with CS5.

Do you need to work with mixed formats, such as SD and HDV and/or AVCHD in the same timeline If you got Cineform's Neoscene or NeoHD, you can convert everything to run under CS3. CS5 does not need necessarily the conversions (though there are be other reasons to use Cineform.)

Do you need/want the ability to make Blu-ray disks with menus. Encore CS5 does this, CS3 does not, If you are not burning BD, you don't care.

How much multi-cam and multi-track editing editing do you do and how much do you work with layers of effects? The more of this you do, the more you may want to consider CS5.

Can you add a Cuda capable video card to your system? This not absolutely necessary. Some folks find software MPE sufficient for their needs. This is subjective, though.

Do you need to edit LPCM audio with your video? CS5 does this, CS3 does not (although NeoHD will now ingest it.) If you do not have a Sony NX5 or somewhat specialized audio recording equipment you do not care about this.

There was discussion above about using an external editing display for HD editing with a Matrox Mini. You need CS4/5 to run the Mini. Since you are holding off on upgrading your computer hardware, I'd guess that you do not care about this.

4. Be aware that perceptions of suitability are subjective. For example, I think your system specs are a bit underpowered for CS5. While I'm not sure that 8 mb of RAM and a dual core processor is enough, there are numbers of forum members who have reported happily using CS5 to edit on laptops with lesser capabilities than your current system.

5. If you want to add to your RAM and going to Win 7, consider getting a separate hard drive for this if there is room in your Dell case for one. From experience with my own and several other folks upgrading to Win 7, I can tell you it is far easier to do a clean install on a new hard drive. You still have you XP drive available if and when something does not work under Win 7. There is something to watch out for here, though. You probably know that you can install your copy of CS3 (or CS5) on two computers (as long as they are not used at the same time, Adobe treats installations under different operating systems as separate computers.) So, if you've got CS3 on the laptop you mentioned, you probably want to deactivate it before trying out CS3 under Win 7 on your main system.

6. Finally, the easiest way to deal with the internet is to just unplug the ethernet cord from your editing system. You only plug it in when you need to update.