Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 first impressions.
I purchased the Premiere Pro 2 upgrade with a special offer a few months ago for $199 and that earned me a free CS3 upgrade for just $5.95 shipping on my credit card, which I received several days ago. So far I only installed the core app. It imported my existing ver. 2.0 projects fine. I like the dockable/undockable panels. The asset bins are much improved, the find feature is nice if you have a lot of assets.
Active panels in the user interface are now highlighted in yellow. It's a nice little touch. I haven't played with the new time remapping feature yet, but I am sure that will be useful for slo-mo cumshots. It doesn't appear that nested sequences need to be re-rendered either, which is one more annoyance now fixed. CS3 now burns to Blue-Ray (don't have a burner to try this) and also has some more small format export profiles, like for Ipod, and mobile and game devices.
Nor have I installed the Encore CS3 upgrade which has some cool features of it's own like allowing one to export DVD menus to automatically create interactive flash content that works like the DVD menus structure it is based on. The On Location software which allows one to record SD or HD directly to hard disks looks interesting as well.
I can say this about my particular workflow, the latest version of Cineform's Aspect HD HDV editing plugin software (ver. 5) paired with CS3 is the first version that has nearly flawless video clip playback. Unlike what many user experienced in previous versions with Premiere Pro 1.5.1 or 2.0, there is no slight change of color or color saturation or stuttering audio when playing clips from the timeline!
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