CS4, what are the most pressing issues and are they solved ???!!!

Question

I'll be visiting the Adobe booth at the IBC on the 15-th to have a sneak preview of CS4.
To properly report back what I have seen, I need a short list of the most pressing issues and what interests you most to see solved or added. Just to name a few of the topics:
1. 64 bit or 32 bit?
2. Support for 64 bit OS and which ones?
3. Matte problems solved? (BTW, what were the exact issues with mattes in CS3?)
4. Titler improvements?
5. What (new) video formats are supported natively?
6. What significant improvements are made in integration in the Suite?
I'm not looking for a repeat of the wishlist, just the most important issues to have a look at.
Looking forward to your suggestions.

Answer 1

Here is the news as I got it from one of the technicians and beta testers at the IBC, who showed some interesting things on the current beta version.
1. The RTM version is not ready yet. It will definitely be this year, but it will not be out in September. Most likely is around November and not all promised features will be available in the 4.0 version, but will be supplied by downloadable patches.
2. Interlacing/de-interlacing has not been solved. It is still the archaic approach from the '70-s era.
3. Vista 64 is officially supported, XP 64 is not officially supported, but runs without problems. Several beta testers have not seen any problems with XP-64. All applications are still 32 bit applications, apart from PS Extended, which is 64 bit. Parts of the memory model are ported to 64 bit. The first steps to porting all applications to 64 bit have been taken, but do not expect full support before CS5.
4. The major improvement has been in the project structure. Every project now has its own information about drive, directory and file structure as part of the project. Files in the project can have different properties in terms of resolution, i or p, so effectively this makes for Edius like capabilities, allowing for different sources in a single project, XDCAM-EX, HDV, AVCHD, P2 sources can be mixed and edited on the same timeline. You can move i material to a p timeline and edit from there.
5. Adobe Media Encoder is now a separate application.
6. Dynamic Linking has been improved significantly and encompasses AE, PP, EN in all directions.
7. Batch processing has been added. You can now add timelines to a render cue and continue editing on the same timeline and there seems to be some intelligence behind it as well.
8. OMF has been vastly improved.
9. The garbage matte problems have been solved.
10. Ultra is still a stand-alone application.
11. Improvements have been made to Encore, whether that includes closing the DVD was not really known.
12. Edit in Audition has been restored.
13. AVCHD is supported, RED support will be added (possibly even for CS3). Note that even on a 4-core MAC the editing experience with AVCHD is tiresome and horrendously slow. You may succeed in editing that kind of material, but only with 8-cores. Otherwise it is like editing HDV on a P4 @ 2.8 GHz with a single disk. It can be done, but it is not a pleasure. The CPU requirements are enormous and IMO most will be heavily disappointed that they need to upgrade their PC before any serious editing can be done, despite all the warnings given.
14. The titler has not been improved, but the strange windows problems (resizing) have been solved.
15. Dependency on Red, MainConcept and others make the delivery dates unsure, but it will take some time and new patches are already being worked on.
16. Adobe at IBC has only beta versions.
17. One member here (I will not mention names) is probably the best beta tester Adobe has ever had and this person beats all other beta testers by a wide margin in finding bugs. Thanks for all your continued trouble, NN. You will know who I mean if you are the person in question. One of your colleague beta testers was in awe of you.
The stability and integration of the suite has been vastly improved and tons of bugs have been resolved, so from that point of view, upgrading to CS4 looks very worthwhile. Initially however, third parties have to resolve some issues with their software, like Sony with their Clip Browser, which contains a serious bug, causing PP to crash completely. These bugs need to be resolved shortly and hopefully will be addressed before the RTM version comes out.