Re: Is your CS4.1 system stable? What are your system specs please?

CS4.1 was a big improvement. I am running it on two systems that have been very stable.

System 1: Built in January (using year old tech)
VisataHomeBasic 64 - Service Pack 2
AMD Athalon64 X2 Dual Core 3.8G
8 Gig RAM
Asus M3N78 Pro Motherboard (nVidia Chipset)
Geforce 8600 Video card + onboard Geforce 8300
400W Power Supply

System 2: this one has been unchanged for years and has been very stable since CS4 (CS3 wasn't too good, but it worked enough to use it for real jobs paying real money.)
XP Pro Service Pack 3
AMD Athalon64 X2 Dual Core 3.4G
4 Gig RAM
Not sure what MB this is - Abit I think - also used nVidia Chipset.
Video Card is also nVidia based - probably an earlier Geforce.
350W Power Supply


Before the upgrade on System 1 I had an ATI based chipset Mother board and video card and it was awful. Also, until last night, I still had the ATI video card in this nVidia based board and it blocked the onboard geforce video card. When i put the Geforce card in the onboard came on - amazing. Now I have 3 monitors - one being the HDTV I use for clients (editing on 3 screens now).

For all video I am using exterior SATA Drives. On the Asus MB system they are true 300Gb SATA drives and I can do compressed HD at high quality with no lag plus they are hot swapable. On the XP system, the SATA drives are treated as IDE's (though still hot swapable) and for some compressed HD (AVCHD and XDCAM) I need to edit in draft mode, but the finals are full quality when rendered out for to disk for layback elsewhere. DV and HDV playback in High quality fine. All this without an additional $1K Kona or Blackmagic or Matrox Video card.

I also work a lot in Final Cut Pro on OSX and it's quite good. I can crash FCP occasionally; just like in the PC world it's possible to download updates that screw the whole system, though it happens less often. I would say that for all the money you pay for the Mac hardware, you get stability. My Vista System cost about $400 (just the box: mb, cpu, gfx, case and power supply) to build. An equivalent Mac runs about $2K.

In conclusion: I believe the Mother Board and Graphics Card chipsets matter a lot - both which kind and which version. The HP systems - I have read - updated all their motherboards for Vista and that's why they work better than many Intel based Systems. I am sticking with Asus motherboards using nVidia chipsets and Nvidia based graphics cards. I buy last years version rather then the latest stuff for cost and because you can catch bad cards in the reviews rather than be the idiot who gets the lemmon ann writes about it (been there, done that.) I am a fan of AMD CPUs as well, but I haven't had an Intel CPU in ages.

I also prefer Premiere Pro over Final Cut. I learned both interfaces simultaneously and PPro makes more sense to me. And I do like being able to do real audio mixes in the timeline and I really like the new Media Encoder and am learning to love the Dynamic Link capability to add After Effects Graphics to PPro timelines - it makes making changes so easy. Still have to render - but then just once. Also really like Dynamic Link in Encore for making DVDs - client changes to video are automatically updated in the DVD - so you can build the DVD before the videos are even done. Just be sure to revert to originals if you've already encoded.