I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary with Adobe Creative Cloud. This might seem odd, as my last Adobe-related blog post was about not wanting to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud. But while I had my concerns, I was already fully converted from FCP7 to Premiere Pro CS6, and I wasn’t about to go back. So instead, I went forward.
In a word, my first year with Adobe Creative Cloud has been uneventful. Which is good. I’ve had a few crashes, but fewer than with any other NLE I have used. It’s never refused to start because of network issues (as some feared). Basically, it’s worked, and worked well.
I have, for the most part, kept current on incremental updates (although I never update in the middle of a project). I’ve never had anything break or witnessed other untoward behavior after an update. And while I have enjoyed knowing that I am always on the latest and greatest, I honestly can’t think of a single new feature in the last year that I’ve used. I was looking forward to audio scrubbing without pitch-shifting in the in the new 2014 update, but…
…due to reports of crashing, lost work and general nastiness, I have not yet updated to CC 2014 (released just a few weeks ago). Once they release the first major patch, I’ll give it another look-see. But until then, my audio scrubs are all chipmunks, yo.
Although I find the integration of Premiere Pro with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite to be nice, I find that I actually need to use the other programs less. Indeed, I just recently used UltraKey (in PPro) to pull a temporary green screen key while I worked on a project, with the intent of using KeyLight in After Effects to pull the final key when ready. But UltraKey did such a great job, I was happy with those results and didn’t even need to bother with AE. Likewise, with FCP7, I was firmly in the habit of creating all titles in Photoshop and importing into FCP7; but the titler in PPro is powerful enough that I find myself using Photoshop less and less. And of course, it’s much more convenient.
The exception here is Adobe Soundtrack, which I now use on every project. It started out just as a way to tackle major audio problems; but exporting an entire sequence to Soundtrack is so quick and clean, and the experience of using it is so simple and powerful, I gradually used it more and more until it became a standard part of my workflow.
Honestly, my biggest problem with Premiere Pro CC is more of an annoyance than a problem: most of the time – the longer I have it open the more likely this becomes – when I shut down PPro, it crashes. It doesn’t lose any work, and it (usually) doesn’t crash while I’m actually using it. But when I finish up for the night, save the project and hit Command-Q, the Premiere process starts pegging my CPU, and I have to force quit. Almost every time. Unless it’s only been open for half an hour. Again, nothing bad has ever come of this – it’s just really annoying. And it is particularly galling given that a) I keep Adobe up-to-date, b) I keep OS X up-to-date, and c) this machine is a beast. It’s got 8 freaking cores and 32 GB of RAM – what more does Premiere want from me?
Anyway, all in all, I’m happy with CC. For now. I still don’t know exactly what happens if I ever want to move away from it, but I don’t think it would be too painful. I could keep the subscription live for a few months while I transition, and even after canceling it, I figure I could always reactivate it for a month here and there if I ever needed to get back into an old project.
Right? I hope? Yes? Please tell me I’m right. I really don’t want all my work hijacked when the next big thing comes around….
