Adobe CS6 Production Premium for Mac

Recently we installed Adobe CS6 Production Premium on all of our mac computers in the creative media rooms. This was in response to feedback from previous users who preferred to use Adobe over Final Cut. We did want to install the latest Final Cut pro x but it does not work over a network, which means it's a no go for us (our creative media Mac set up redirects users accounts to work directly over the network). We also have Adobe installed on all managed desktops and so we felt users were more familiar using it then Final Cut.

We have however experienced some technical issues with it.

1. If you do not open all the apps under root (computer administrator) account, some applications do not function properly for all other users.  This was especially apparent when using Premiere Pro for example. The affect of not opening the application first under root account was that users could not playback the timeline of their project properly. When playing back the edit media on the timeline it would play for approx. 2 seconds and stop.  It seems that until you have opened all applications under root account, there are necessary files and templates missing which causes these strange ongoings.


2. Photoshop does not work over a network.  This is a particular problem for our creative media set up, as all users files are re-directed to work over a network on log on. We have done a lot of research and even tried ticking it to think it is working locally using log on scripts. Unfortunately we didn't have any luck and it seems we have to wait for Adobe and Apple to sort themselves out and produce a fix.  This issue is specific to CS6 only.  The result of this issue means that when using Photoshop it gives you the impression you can save normally, however if you look at the location you saved it, it is not there. It instead places it in a user/cache/temporary items folder. If you do not log off you can open up your file via 'open recent...' via Photoshop.  However, once logged off all files stored in the temporary items folder are deleted. To avoid this we have advised students to save their Photoshop work to an external flash drive. We have also created a log off script to copy the contents of the temporary items folder at log off (before they are deleted) to the users' library folder. This is not ideal, but unfortunately we can now only wait for a fix to be released by Adobe.


3. When exporting media it seems to take a lot longer then you would expect.  This particularly occurs when choosing the generic codecs we are used to using. What we have done since discovering this is to find a compression in which it doesn't take five times the duration of the project, but instead max twice the duration.  At present it seems that if you select to export with Apple TV compression it provides the fastest export time, in 720p, at a very reasonable MB's per minute ratio (meaning export files are nice a small).

On reflection it would have been best to go for Adobe CS5.5 to avoid a lot of the issues we have (in particular with Photoshop). 

Installing CS6 has proved that it's not always best to go for the latest technology.

Chris