Poll Results: CS3 it is (huh?)

OK, so after running the poll for around 2 weeks, the results are in. A majority of you are using After Effects CS4, with CS5 following closely in a second place. CS3 takes the third with 14% of votes. What does that mean?

It pretty much means I will continue producing the tutorials using CS3 as a base, lowest version supported.

More after the break.

First of all, although only 40 people voted for CS3, I am up-scaling the results according to the tutorial viewing statistics. While less than 300 people voted in the poll (and I thank the ones that did), each of the tutorials is being viewed a minimum of 10,000 times. This means there would be approximately 1,400 people left out in the cold, should I abandon CS3 support.

Second, I am not going to install CS4. You can’t make me! I love Adobe and their products, but in my humble opinion, CS4 was the worst release (across all the Suite programs) ever done. I haven’t even bothered buying that one – upgraded directly from CS3 to CS5. (I did have some hands-on experience both in Beta and using the trial version).

What does that mean? Well, Since the new system only has CS5 installed at the moment, I will be installing my old copy of CS3 sometime soon and then digging through the old discs to find all the necessary plugins in 32bit versions. Once that’s ready I should get onto recording that long-delayed particular disintegration tutorial. (You may have noticed that Red Giant recently released a tutorial on this technique, but trust me – my solution is simpler, more elegant and will compute much faster).

Finally, a message to all the CS4 users: UPGRADE! You are missing tremendous performance improvements, proper memory utilization, overall stability and some cool new features. I hope that next time I will make a survey like that, I will see more users riding the 64bit train.

Cheers!