Adobe, CS4 is not ready for release.

Question

Dear Adobe,
I have been using Premiere as my primary editor for years (I think I started on version 6). Although some versions had flaws and the occasional crash, they were reasonably competant apps which did the job.
CS4 is not. In the 24 hours since I installed it I have seen my first-ever Blue Screen of Death on my workstation (in 18 months of working day in day out). CS4 crashes about 50% of the time on start-up. It often takes the window organisation with it, so next time I start up I get a blank work window and have to reset to default to get anything back. Then it most likely crashes again. I've had more crashes in one day trying to edit one single video than I have had in all my previous years of using Premiere put together.
CS3 runs stably on the same system, and still appears to do so. So please do not ty to make excuses about it being some other software installed on the system's fault. CS4 is buggy as hell and that's all there is to say. (I'm on XP, service pack 3, latest drivers for video cards recently installed to see if it fixed crashes, it does not. Dual core athlon, 4 GB of memory, 8800 GTS graphics card.)
To cap it off, the new feature which I was most looking forward to, batch export, is also unreliable. It cannot export to H264 25 fps from my 25 fps Panasonic P2 DVC PRO HD original files - it stutters and has pure green frames everywhere. The export to WMV appears to have the wrong gamma, and have bad artefacts to boot, and is glacially slow. I was hoping to be able to get rid of the need for ProCoder 3, but Media Export is unusable for website production in this release.
My other main workhorse, magic bullet looks, has been upgraded to version 1.2 to try to work with CS4. It worked with 4.0.0 raw off the CD, but now that I've updated to the latest release, it reliably crashes CS4 whenever I try to apply it to a clip.
The ONLY saving grace of this release is that it does not appear to have messed up my CS3 installation, so I can still do some work.
This is utterly unacceptable in any product, but especially in one bearing a "Pro" moniker.
I was contemplating a new workstation to speed up workflow now that everything I have moved entirely to P2-based production. CS4 has given me the strongest possible impetus to look very closely at the Mac alternatives and Final Cut Pro.
You seriously need to fix these issues, and on a timescale of weeks, not months, if you want to retain me as a customer.
Hywel Phillips.

Answer 1

Hi,
I've contacted Adobe support as well now, thanks for the heads-up.
I'm using an Nvidia 8800 GTS with latest drivers. The crashes were similar in frequency before and after the driver change, as I tried that as part of my bug hunting. Ditto latest version of DirectX 9. Windows XP SP3, Athlon 64 X2 dual core, 4 GB RAM.
Looks 1.2 seemed to work with version 4.0.0 but reliably crashes the app when I try to apply it to a clip in 4.0.1. I will try reinstalling Looks afresh as I did the install before updating to 4.0.1.
Slow AME: I had preview "on". Silly me, in Procoder 3 or Cleaner XL it made no significant difference to render times so I kinda hoped Adobe could code it thus. Apparently not. I probably had max quality ticked as well, if that's the default out of the box. I didn't use exporter in the old version to create MP4 or WMV files, I wrote an intermediate AVI file and used that to Procoder from, plus a P2 output render for archival. Those bits seem to work fine, but the AME output quality on the MP4 and WMV files is absolutely awful, compared with output with settings as near as I can tell are the same in Procoder 3. And Procoder 3 is probably a factor of 6-10 faster, especially for the WMV.
Thanks to all for suggestions... and for knowing that I am not alone. The Final Cut Pro option is looking more and more attractive, given that I have someone else starting to share the work editing for me and I have to give him a working system somehow. CS4, on current performance, is literally unusable on my main system and so buying a machine to run it feels like a fool's errand (especially as I'd then have to contaminate the office which a copy of Vista, something I have thus far avoided!)
Anyone know of any discussion/comparsions between Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro? I'm guessing FCP doesn't have nested timelines, a neat feature but one which I think I can live without. It looks like FCP can finally deal with P2 input natively now, which was the big issue for me before. Can it do multicam, anyone know?
Cheers, Hywel.