I am a FCP7 refugee trying to decide between Avid and PP CS6. After waiting for a few weeks for it to be available, I have been lookiig through the PP CS6 Help PDF. I was surprised to see that it is not a complete reference guide documenting the features of the application, but instead a mish-mash of short descriptions, with numerous links to videos, documents from earlier versions, and other external locations where one has to go to get the actual information--not very helpful as a guide to the application. Is there actually no comprehensive user guide from Adobe in a single document or PDF? Or is the only way to get information about the application to navigate through all these disjointed materials?
If there is such a user guide, I would very much like to know where I can find it. If there isn't, I would have to count this as a very big factor in favor of deciding to go with Avid. This is particularly true given the absence of any current third-party books on PPro CS6, although such books are hardly a substitute for a well written and comprehensive user guide, something which is also true of the help PDF.
The online help you can find here (pdf is the same)
http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/topics.html#dynamicpod_reference_5
Thanks for the replies, John and Ann.
Since the links are to the on-line CS6 help and the PDF version of that help, both of which are a collection of materials concerning CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 with links to external sources you have to go to for information, I guess the answer to my question is that there is no true user guide for Premiere Pro CS6 that one can go to for comprehensive information about the application without sorting through irrelevant information or navigating to all these third-party sites to see if they have information you are looking for.
I am quite surprised by this and think the absence of a real user guide is a significant shortcoming of Premiere Pro, not shared by other products on the market.
I totally agree. The CS6 help should not have been mixed with CS5.5 and CS5. Makes it all cluttered.
I did complain in this forum.
http://forums.adobe.com/community/creativesuites/communityhelp?view=di scussions
But nobody seems to care.
Groppler wrote:
Since the links are to the on-line CS6 help and the PDF version of that help, both of which are a collection of materials concerning CS5, CS5.5 and CS6...
Yes, for CS6, new information was added to the CS5/CS5.5 documentation. We had to go this route because we are working with brand new documentation software. There simply was not enough time to integrate the software and complete a whole new set of documentation. Believe me, it was enough of a challenge integrating the old system with the new one--in addition to creating the articles for new features, and the connective tissue between them.
There is only one person that does the docs for Premiere Pro, and that is me. I have limitations and guidelines I must follow, so I hope you understand.
Groppler wrote:
...with links to external sources you have to go to for information, I guess the answer to my question is that there is no true user guide for Premiere Pro CS6 that one can go to for comprehensive information about the application...
No, this is the Help. It has BOTH the comprehensive details about the software and community content where you can see how people are actually using the software. If the Help is lacking details about any feature, please alert me and I will include those details. I work directly from the engineering documentation and include every detail I can about any feature.
Since my time is limited, I don't always have time to make supplemental materials like video tutorials, or articles. That's why I link to them. The crucial info is included in the docs, the community content is material that I personally approve as helpful and supportive to the documentation.
Groppler wrote:
...without sorting through irrelevant information or navigating to all these third-party sites to see if they have information you are looking for.
None of the community content is irrelevant. I sort through it all very carefully. Community content is supportive and helpful to users. It should not be necessary to sort through these tutorials as the info should be right in the docs. Community content is supplemental. If you don't find the information you were looking for in the docs themselves, create a comment right on the Help page and I'll see to it that it gets fixed ASAP.
Groppler wrote:
I am quite surprised by this and think the absence of a real user guide is a significant shortcoming of Premiere Pro, not shared by other products on the market.
It is a real user guide. I'm sorry you don't feel that way. If you want a doc with only Premiere Pro CS6 info in it, I can understand that request. Unfortunately, that was impossible for this round.
If you have any suggestions for the next round of Help documentation, a better place than here would be the Community Help forum. Please voice your concerns there, as the people that actually make decisions about Help are hanging out there.
Jim Simon wrote:
We had to go this route because we are working with brand new documentation software.
Huh? It's still a PDF isn't it? What's "new" about that?
<TIC>PDF is a delivery format, not suitable for document creation. The original ideas from a professional mind were captured by the new documentation software.</TIC>
Jeff
>understand what the major complaint is
What I responded to was your complaint saying "Separate the docs" and I pointed out that the page I linked to back in #1 does have two different document paths to download what would appear to be two different documents
I was not addressing the quality or content of the CS6 document, only that it is reached by a web link that is different than the link for the CS5/5.5 document
Jim Simon wrote:
We had to go this route because we are working with brand new documentation software.
Huh? It's still a PDF isn't it? What's "new" about that?
Good point! It is only a PDF after all.
There are lots of nitty-gritty details that I'll spare you of, but in this case, we are still maintaining documentation that does not change (or changes very little) in the legacy documentation system. The technical challenge in creating this PDF is that we had to combine the pages from two very different systems and bring them together into a single document. This took some engineering and testing to achieve that. The new doc system is also a 1.0 piece of software, so that added even more challenges, as you might imagine.
You can see the two different systems in Help by checking out the URLs. helpx.adobe.com is the new stuff, and help.adobe.com is the legacy material. I'm sure you can imagine the fun I have maintaining two different documentation systems for 5 different products!
Over the next couple of months, you should see improvements to the content in Help. More to come and thanks for the good questions.
Ann Bens wrote:
I totally agree. The CS6 help should not have been mixed with CS5.5 and CS5. Makes it all cluttered.
I did complain in this forum.
http://forums.adobe.com/community/creativesuites/communityhelp?view=di scussions
But nobody seems to care.
We do care, Ann. Yesterday, we had a meeting with all the tech writers and I advocated for you and your wish to have a separate CS6 document. Our doc system uses metadata, so I don't see that as an unreasonable feature request.
The technical challenge in creating this PDF is that we had to combine the pages from two very different systems and bring them together into a single document.
That sounds a little backwards to me, Kevin. Wouldn't it be simpler to create the help files in Acrobat, from which you then generate the PDFs and copy into the online Help system?
Jim Simon wrote:
That sounds a little backwards to me, Kevin. Wouldn't it be simpler to create the help files in Acrobat, from which you then generate the PDFs and copy into the online Help system?
Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. To recreate all the 800+ pages in Acrobat would be no easy chore, plus, you can't copy/paste material easily into our authoring tool. I have nothing to do with processes, tool selection, methodology, etc., therefore, I must follow the guidelines given to me by my supervisors.
the absence of a real user guide is a significant shortcoming of Premiere Pro
Oh my freakin' GOD are you right about this! I had to try and find something today, and it was impossible. I never found it. It's links and redirects galore, but never the real data.
Kevin, we NEED a self-contained PDF that has all the information, no links to anywhere but within that PDF. This should not be considered an option, or a nice idea. It really is a MUST HAVE.
And if it'll really be 800+ pages, then you'd better get started, because that self-contaied PDF really should have shipped with CS6.
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