Adobe CS3 is packed full of great ideas and cool features. The only problem: it doesn’t work. This weekend, I made the unfortunate mistake of depending on Adobe CS3 (Premiere, OnLocation, After Effects, Photoshop and Bridge) to produce a 15 minute highlight movie of a live event.

After a series of hardware problems, the Adobe problems started. All of them were in Premiere, but they made using the other programs time and energy-consuming, two resources I didn’t have.

My project required me to capture footage from six different cameras and to combine them into one movie with some animations and titles made in After Effects. Right off the bat, Dynamic Link refused to work, making tweaking my titles extremely time consuming, having to export my composition every time I made changes to see how it looked in Premiere. Then, Premiere refused to import mpeg’s. Fact: CS3 is the only product from Adobe (and pretty much any other program) that doesn’t support mpeg’s. Which is a problem when one of your cameras is a HDD that captures only in mpeg’s. A call to Adobe puts us on the line with a woman who refused to understand it was physically impossible for me to give her my serial key for my Production Premium since I was at a live event and didn’t carry around my box. Fortunately, a patch was found on some website magically making mpeg’s supported for import. But here’s another fact: Adobe doesn’t support CS3. That means if you call them and ask for CS3 help, you will be put on hold indefinetly.

Once my project file started becoming big (around 1TB including footage), Adobe started crashing for no reason. When I restarted it, it would take 15 minutes to load and would use up all of my memory during that time, as well as a good part of my CPU.

When time came to export my finally finished movie, it crashed and I lost my crucial last 4 minutes of work (fortunately I had the idea to set autosave to 5 minutes). Those 4 lost minutes made the difference and our movie was not shown when it was supposed to be. There were more than a thousand people who were there to see that video, and upwards of two months of work had been put into it. Although other problems happened, CS3 was the biggest.

Our colleages who happened to be using Premiere Pro 1.5 had no problems at all. However, their After Effects kept on crashing as they tried to export their animations (which put us back 2 hours).

The lesson of the story is, honestly, not to use Premiere. After Effects CS3 looks pretty solid (it hasn’t crashed once on me) but Premiere was totally unreliable. I prefer to not have the intergration between Premiere and After Effects by using Final Cut then to risk losing work like I did.