I am glad to see that industry professionals are onto Adobe and their CS5 platform.  I have cut many video projects on most of the 'industry accepted' platforms (I own two Avid's, have worked on FCP and others) and about two years ago I moved to CS4. The biggest reason was that, since I saw that the product had matured rather quickly from it's early days, I could work in Photoshop or After Effects and import the files directly to the Premiere timeline (dynamic link) and then have them update when changes were made, on the fly!  I can't tell you how many 'years' I've wasted with rendering, exporting, importing... OMG!

Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks is one of my favorite plugins for achieving a 'filmic' look for video. It worked very well on standard definition (SD) video and is even better on high definition (HD) footage.  I remember the first time I saw the plugin. I had to work with it that day and had zero knowledge or experience with it. I knew of it but I didn't know it. But once I looked inside, even though it wasn't intuitive at first, I found it relatively straight forward.

It's finally here... Editshare has released the Public Beta of Lightworks.  Lightworks was one of the first non-linear editors along with Avid and gained a healthy reputation. But they squandered it and all but vanished from the scene. Many a feature film has been cut on this platform and the new owners of the software, Editshare, have released this as 'open source', which means free.  Well, 'open source' doesn't technically mean free but in this case the software is free!