For me, the pricing isn't a problem: less than £50/month including the VAT for every product in the Adobe Master collection plus lots more programs plus all the creative cloud benefits (website hosting, cloud storage, etc) represent good value for me. I was a Production Premium user from CS3 to CS5.5 but also paid for Dreamweaver and Lightroom. Now they're all included in one monthly payment, which I'm sure works out less than the annual upgrade, and it spreads the cost across the whole year. I've also found myself taking advantage of having all these programs I didn't have before. Am using Acrobat a lot, have been making websites in Muse, using Illustrator to create motion paths for use in After Effects, and am now using InDesign for all my printed material.
If I stopped subscribing, what are the issues... I won't lose any of my media... I wouldn't stop subscribing overnight, I'd be able to archive everything into a form which I could open using my legacy software, or an alternative. So all my PSD files will still open in the older versions of Photoshop I own. The CS6 Premiere Pro projects won't open in CS5 anyhow, so I can just output the EDLs as XML.. etc etc.
The one major issue for me would be access to my Lightroom catalogue, but they're going to continue to offer Lightroom as a stand alone product.
Otherwise, if there was something I desperately needed to access again using the Adobe software then I can just rent the program or the entire suite for a month.
I'm not too worried, frankly. But then I'm doing this for a living, not a hobby.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, and I'm sure every other software manufacturer is keeping a close eye on this. Adobe won't have decided to do this on the spur of the moment. They'll have conducted lots of market research and testing, and they'll have closely observed what happened with Apple and the FCPX "fiasco" to see what happens when you break an accepted model.
One of the huge advantages is that Adobe will no longer be restricted by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (some daft American law which restricts offering free feature upgrades). Photoshop users have seen the benefit of this over the last year where CC subscribers got lots of little extras and improvements which weren't available to those who bought the "perpetual" licence.
The bottom line is going to be the bottom line: keep an eye on Adobe's stock prices!
You must have money to burn, you are paying £900 every 18 months (the Adobe product cycle period for CS versions) for software that would cost less than £500 to upgrade under the old system
I would not mind the subscription way if (a) the cost was way the hell less (b) if after subscribing for say 18 months I could cease and transfer to a perpetual license
http://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2013/07/ppro-cc-july-2013-update.html
Some bug fixes, but a lot of new features.
Previous to the cloud model they'd have had to wait for a proper point release to bring new features to the application since they were limited by that daft American law which prevented them from released new features for free.
So, for those of us who've been editing with PremierePro CC lots of nice new productivity improvers. And I expect we'll see such updates - the things that are in the engineers JDI lists - appearing in the other applications soon too.
Apple seem to have lost the plot with FCPX, Adobe has been a bit disappointing (let alone the Creative Cloud scenario) - whilst Avid have reduced the cost of their software. Let's face it, the reason I didn't buy that in the first place was the cost then compared to the others. And whilst the vendors make big issue about the whizz-bang features of their product, the area in which Avid totally trounces the likes of Premiere is the feature that editors use very, very often - the trim mode. Do trimming in Avid and life becomes easy compared with any other program on the market.
I don't mean to tell you something that you don't know, but in CS6 there are two different - well, three, if you count trimming in the timeline - trim methods
There's the "legacy" one, which you get to by going Window -> Trim monitor, and then there's the much improved method - new to CS6 - where you highlight an edit point and hit T (or go sequence -> trim edit). This is generally called Dynamic Trimming. This brings up the trim window in the program monitor and allows you to do all your trimming using the keyboard.
http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/trimming-clips1.html#work_in_trim_mode
I followed a few tutorials and spent some time really learning how to do this - mostly prompted by Andrew Devis' enthusiastic videos on Creative Cloud here, numbers 21, 22, and 23.
I won't go so far as to say it's changed my life, but it's certainly changed how I edit, and speeded up my work no end. I can rip through a sequence pretty quickly now, doing all the work in Dynamic Trim, and hardly having to toch the mouse at all. If you haven't hit on this way of working, I'd recommend spending a bit of time getting up to speed on it. And if this is the way you've been working, and can't stand it, well, fair enough! I don't know Avid well, so I can't compare their methods and relative trimming merits.
Is your main disappointment in Premiere its trimming abilities?
It's a combination of things, trim mode is the simplest to give as a single example. If you want another, it doesn't seem possible to do what I'd call "smart render", at least without a plugin? (Please correct me if I'm wrong!) Hence, if you are working with a format like XDCAM, and the edit consists mainly of a number of cuts, there is a lot of merit on final export in just rendering around the edits themselves to recreate a GOP structure. Most of the material stays as the original - no decoding/recoding - only a few frames around edits. It seems with Premiere that you have to select a precise codec, bitrate etc to code into - "keep as original" doesn't seem to be an option?
.........then there's the much improved method - new to CS6 - where you highlight an edit point and hit T (or go sequence -> trim edit). This is generally called Dynamic Trimming. This brings up the trim window in the program monitor and allows you to do all your trimming using the keyboard.............it's certainly changed how I edit, and speeded up my work no end. I can rip through a sequence pretty quickly now, doing all the work in Dynamic Trim, and hardly having to toch the mouse at all. If you haven't hit on this way of working, I'd recommend spending a bit of time getting up to speed on it. And if this is the way you've been working, and can't stand it..........
I'm aware of that, and use it..... in many ways it's similar to the simplest form of the Avid way. Fine for some edits, but nowhere near as comprehensive or versatile as what the Avid trim mode allows, and the beauty of the Avid approach is that it's far more intuitive as well! I won't go into all the whole details, but it's things like slip/slide edits and the Avid four window mode. The way in which Avid trim works with split edits on different tracks. Being able to trim off an out point on one track of an edit point, whilst trimming the corresponding in point of the next clip on a different track. (Easier to do than describe! And very useful if you're cutting sync speech.)
I won't go so far as to say it's changed my life, but , well, fair enough! I don't know Avid well, so I can't compare their methods and relative trimming merits.
Try Avid!! When it was much more expensive than Adobe, it was a case of get what you pay for - and more than I was prepared to pay for the advantages. Now Avid have cut their prices, and Adobe have gone to the "Creative Cloud" model, everything changes - Avid becomes far more competitive. (Very briefly, Avid requires you to click on beginnings and ends of clips when a "roller" appears, one or two per track, depending on the type of edit. Highly flexible - the "rollers" can be anywhere track-track and very intuitive as you can visualise what's happening. Try it!)