CS4 Unusable in a professional setup

Question

I just failed to meet yet another important deadline. I have been struggling with CS4 since it first came out and in my opinion the software is just not stable or reliable.. We are principally independent film makers but do documentary work too. We use the entire suite in our studios. We have had more downtime because of it than any other release of anything that I have ever used and my time dates back to DOS. I have been patient and my investment in the upgrade has made me reluctant to give up on it but quite frankly I have had enough. Even if it does work Premier in particular is far too slow. It is not that I have been trying to use it on an inadequate system my specs are higher than Adobe recommends and the systems are purpose built by professionals. The much vaunted new features just don’t work reliably if at all and it’s a liability to use in a professional capacity. I am looking to replace the entire suite but until then I have reverted to CS3 which although it has its problems at least it performs. This is only my opinion but it is based on experience. The reason I post this is to let Adobe know they have lost yet another customer and perhaps to warn other users what they could be letting themselves in for.

Answer 1

Rod wrote:
"I just failed to meet yet another important deadline."
We also use CS4 Production Premium to earn a living. We've had some close calls with deadlines. The kind we can't afford to miss are deadlines related to videos for live meetings. If we missed one of those, we could possibly lose an account. We have a deadline this Wednesday for a corporate marketing video. For this video, I copied a fairly large project to a new hard drive last night using Premiere's Project Manager so that our producer could do some editing on his laptop from home today (Saturday). The project is standard def widescreen with some P2 1080i (MXF crapola) footage mixed in. The project opened once on his laptop, then just spun its wheels when he attempted to open it a second time. I think it may have something to do with the ridiculously long cryptic (program generated) file names given to P2 MXF files by Premiere's Project Manager. I think the creation of peak files adds more characters than Windows allows. Just a guess, who knows. I spent part of my day off today doing over the phone tech support.
Things can always be worse though. One of the independent film makers who works out of our office told me about the time he was getting some b-roll in a parking lot of an event. One of his crew left his $70,000 camera behind a car. This was the only car that left the lot. The camera was crushed to pieces. The same guy told me of the time he accidentally knocked over an external hard drive that had all of the show masters on it the day before a live staging event. The drive was toast. He had to rebuild everything.
A producer who works with us told me of the time a cameraman dropped his $80,000 camera off of a bridge into the Detroit river.
A staging guy told me of the time he was leaving a hotel when a bus ran over a box of beta tapes he borrowed from a major studio.
Yesterday the owner of the company I work for and I were watching a render take about 30 seconds. He told me about the stress of having a deadline 10 years ago when an Avid would take all night to render, get 98% through the process, then crash. Macs back then would do the same thing. Take forever to render then crash at the end of a 12 hour render.
Adobe has 4.2 coming out soon.  I hope this update makes our lives a little easier. We're also switching to Windows 7 Professional in a few weeks.
There seems to always be one challenge or another. I do think things will be getting better. Next time I may wait before jumping into CS5, unless of course it's like going from Vista to Windows 7. We'll wait and see.
Lastly, we can be thankful we aren't Website designers. I'm currently learning CSS and Website editing in Fireworks and Dreamweaver. You have to enjoy solving mysteries to get into Web Design these days using CSS. The rules, alignment issues, code interaction details and browser compatibility work-arounds get downright ugly.