Adobe CS5.5 Update

Adobe has recently announced the upgrade to CS5 by offering a dot upgrade with CS5.5.  Now CS5 is truly amazing for me as a video editor and content creator. Why? Well, read on my friends.

For me, the CS5 Mercury Playback Engine was such a godsend.  It made my life, at least my editing life, much faster and easier to work within. If you don't know what the Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) is, then your either not interested, live in a cave or don't have any connection to the editing world. To make a long story short, Adobe and nVidia (video card manufacturers) got together and started to use the video cards built in, on-board Memory to accelerate certain processes, mainly allowing for more real-time streams of video.  In the past, you had to render lots to see your final playback but now, you can have multiple streams of video (YES even HD video) playback just fine, thank you very much.

To me this little thing alone pushed Adobe and Premiere way out in front of Final Cut and Avid.  Sure Adobe really needs to address some issues that both of these programs have already done so, but for the most part, editing on Premiere is so simple and easy that it scares me! As a matter of fact I very rarely open my Avid... (there's a few things that Avid does that I still use, one of which is fixing video files with 'issues' - the other day I had a quicktime file that imported very weird into Premiere, so instead I imported it into Avid and then exported it out again - uncompressed - and it fixed that little issue). And with this new upgrade Adobe is starting address some of these types of issues.

Adobe is offering this mid cycle upgrade BUT they want cash for it... so this is not an Update per se, but an Upgrade (at least that's how I've always defined these things). Is it worth it? Well, I can't answer that as the information on the Adobe site makes it seem worthwhile but I don't have a clear understanding of exactly what Cs5.5 Mercury Playback Engine's 'improvements' means.

There's some good features (like the new Film Dissolve - been missing that as I've been using that in Avid for YEARS!), also they've brought back Audition (audio editing program) which should be better than Soundbooth (I never really understood why they have both Soundbooth and Audition but... they do). They've also added more support for DSLR shooters which is great news as more and more people are using these to capture content (I'm one of them!).

So is this upgrade worth it for you? Check out Adobe CS5.5 and decide for yourself... me? I'll probably end up getting it... I do like new versions and updates, keeps me current (or at least I feel that way!)