Quote: "Not a Single Pro, or Aspiring Pro Uses Premiere" ...?

[Anthony Marotti]

Thanks for the feedback - very insightful!

And Craig, I think you summed it up for me in a way that follows my experience.

Here is what I have concluded so far, please check my reasoning.


** For my Web content, stick with PPro, BUT Don't buy the AXIO because it may be overkill for the task at hand.

BTW I have used Premiere with Canopus and Matrox products and I don't believe that it will ever be stable when used with accelerator boards. And when on the AXIO forums, it sounded like they have the same problems that Canopus had, and their RT100 had, so I can relate to what you said about stability. And whereas PPro works much better stand-alone, it still crashes when you try to make it work too hard, as in a high paced work environment.

** Then for my independent film needs, I'll get a FCP system. All of the shorts and low budget features that I've worked on where cut with FCP, so I will be compatible with those production teams in the future.

** If my needs are more demanding, I'll go to one of my Avid houses (budget willing-or I'll use PPro or FCP).

Does that make sense - especially about not going with the AXIO??

Thanks Guys

[Craig Parkes]

What you may find when you switch to Final Cut Pro for independent production purposes is that it fills all your needs and you no longer need Premiere Pro for cutting at all - but continue using Adobe products on your other machine because After Effects is awesome (while Motion is buggy and unstable as hell - can do cool things, just can't be relied upon to work.)

[Jiri Fiala]

Craig, I could swear by your words. Premiere is awesome for event/corporate jobs, anything that you do on your own, on one machine, but any collaboration on a pro level (sound post) is simply impossible.

Anthony - hardware-based solutions are picky, they are inherently unstable and buggy (I did a bad decision of buying a Matrox RTX2) and they lock your workflow to a single machine with the installed HW. Go for more CPU power and RAM instead of specialised hardware. It may be great if you need to churn out jobs at breakneck speed, but other than that - they are not worth it. That`s my opinion, anyway.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Craig Parkes

Premiere is further behind than both AVID and Final Cut on some key parts of the equation for purely cutting environments

Hi Craig. Can you elaborate on this? What are the editing features that FCP has that Premiere is lacking?

Learning Premiere Pro on the route to becoming a professional editor at the moment is a bit akin to the early days learning desktop printing on inkjets when wanting to work in the world of professional printing presses - you'll get some of the same principles, and may be able to produce high quality products yourself - but it's not designed for the same scale of production from the ground up and thus isn't as accepted and thus isn't likely to get you work.

Again, can you give us more details on what are the differences?

Thanks!

[Craig Parkes]

Avid automatically builds a database of all the footage you capture into the machine, organizes all this footage so it is quickly searchable, allows you to delete the actual footage and recapture the footage in a batch, also allows you to capture footage at an offline resolution to save space, delete all the original media, but then recapture all the footage at a fully uncompressed rate to do the online.

This offline/online workflow requires a bulletproof media management system which allows you to track what footage is on what tape and has come from where, so that you can start a project, get halfway through, delete all the footage of your drive if need be to start another project, complete that project, then batch capture back the footage from the original project so you have it back in the machine and have pretty much everything as you left it.

This is Avid's key advantage. It's responsiveness and interface is also highly tuned to the needs of high volume editing - it's not as simple to learn or as intuitive as other products, but someone who is good at Avid can almost always cut stuff quicker than someone good with Premiere could cut stuff.

Final Cut's advantages are mainly with it's improved robustness in long form projects over Premiere, it's handling of a number of HD footage solutions, it's batch capturing and hardware interface process (although nowhere near as robust as Avid it is still quite usable) and it's intergration with Motion, Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro and most importantly Compressor (Soundtrack Pro integration isn't such a bonus as the general opinion of Soundtrack Pro isn't that high - integration with Compressor and DVD Studio Pro is hugely advantageous when finishing to multiple formats, including DVD.)

Also, there are things like Final Cut Pro's XML export options (which are becoming more and more used) as well as EDL functionality in both Final Cut and Avid (more robust in Avid) - Avid's project portability and stability between different editing suites, etc.

All in all the advantages aren't strictly related to what you can do when editing (both Final Cut, Avid and I imagine even Premiere have specific contextual or toolset advantages when it comes to making your video cut and playback the way you want it to on the timeline.)

It is mainly the stuff outside manipulating footage on the timeline - ingesting and exporting footage, handling OMF export for doing sound mixes, handling a high amount of codecs (simultaneously for Final Cut if necessary, or via intermediate codecs that come with the programmes - DNxHD in Avid's case and Prores in the case of FCS2). Where you will really see the difference between what is needed in a 'professional' offline/online environment, and what is needed in a single seat editing environment.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Craig Parkes

Final Cut's advantages are mainly with it's improved robustness in long form projects over Premiere

Are you sure about this? I had several horror stories of FCP project files corrupted beyond repair for pretty short sequences. I have been testing Premiere with project that literally have +2100 media files and it's handling it very well with no much of a warning message or anything. FCP's need to delete the configuration files is a well-know problem and one documented in every tutorial by Larry Jordan. On the editing features, Premiere's ability to trim clips without invalidatings them completely, unlike FCP which forces you to re-render the clip, has been a big time saver for me. Also, the ability to do L-cuts and J-cust in Premiere by simply holding the Option/Alt key to change the length of the clip with unlinking it from the sound is a big help.

and it's intergration with Motion, Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro and most importantly Compressor (Soundtrack Pro integration isn't such a bonus as the general opinion of Soundtrack Pro isn't that high - integration with Compressor and DVD Studio Pro is hugely advantageous when finishing to multiple formats, including DVD.)

Well, integration with Motion is really not a plus considering that that is virtually non-existent in the motion grahics market, a field dominated, absolutely dominated by After Effects. So, that feature is actually a problem. The Compressor integration is also not important as we all know that sending to Compressor is not the most efficient, time-saving approach. With FCP I save the sequence to a QT reference file and then drag the file to Compressor. Same approach can be used from Premiere, in fact with every NLE. The big bonus, and I recognize that, is the *inclusion* of Compressor, something that Adobe should address asap. But the integration is a non-issue. About DVD, Encore is a nice piece of software that can do anything that DVD Studio can do and it's perfectly integrated in Premiere. As a matter of fact, Adobe has been much more successful in keeping the UI consistent among products. AE, Premiere, Encore, they all share the same UI system and the integration feels really like that, integration. FCP, DVD Studio, Color, Motion and Shake they don't even seem like they come from the same company.

Also, there are things like Final Cut Pro's XML export options (which are becoming more and more used) as well as EDL

True, but Premiere's project files are *written* in XML so the system is built-in, no need to export.

It is mainly the stuff outside manipulating footage on the timeline - ingesting and exporting footage, handling OMF export for doing sound mixes, handling a high amount of codecs (simultaneously for Final Cut if necessary, or via intermediate codecs that come with the programmes - DNxHD in Avid's case and Prores in the case of FCS2).

This is actually an interesting topic as often I see the reference how FCP handles so many file formats while in reality it works with one media format: QuickTime. As long as you can convert your footage to QT then you can use it in FCP. If you can't then you are out of luck. On the other hand Premiere doesn't have this limitation. It works with QT but also with MPEG files directly, a feature that helps capturing HDV footage without conversion or transcoding. It also handles sequences of images, something that is used all the time in professional visual effects. FCP can't handle image sequences, quite a glaring omission, IMHO.

So, all in all, I believe that the problem with Premiere is of perception. So many people talked trash about it that people started believing the "word" on the street. It was the same for me. I gave it a try and I was very pleasantly surprised at the advanced, professional features that it has.

[Mitchell Skurnik]

I agree with Paolo. I have been using Premiere since 2005 and have had great luck with it. Yes I have had Premiere crash and all that but any system will do that. Creative Suites price point and amazing intergration has saved me countless hours and $$$.

Whenever you start to use a piece of software, you need to be open to how it works. If you go into something like this with a negative attitude, you will probably have a crappy experience. Now there is a lot of room for improvement and somethings just annoy the hell out of me with Premiere, but eventualy they will be corrected.

[Eric Addison]

"So, all in all, I believe that the problem with Premiere is of perception. So many people talked trash about it that people started believing the "word" on the street. It was the same for me. I gave it a try and I was very pleasantly surprised at the advanced, professional features that it has."

As a long time PPro user, this is the truest statement. I don't mean to underestimate anyone's knowledge or background, but I wonder how many people that slam PPro have used it lately.

[Bart Walczak]

Originally Posted by Eric Addison

"So, all in all, I believe that the problem with Premiere is of perception. So many people talked trash about it that people started believing the "word" on the street. It was the same for me. I gave it a try and I was very pleasantly surprised at the advanced, professional features that it has."

As a long time PPro user, this is the truest statement. I don't mean to underestimate anyone's knowledge or background, but I wonder how many people that slam PPro have used it lately.

I absolutely love the freedom that PPro gives me in editing. There are a couple of features missing, but overall I found FCP more limited in this respect. It might be my own perception, or the fact that I've been on the PPro for past couple of years, and FCP just for 1 year, but still.

The only real issue I have with Adobe is that it is unstable in the new version, and its performance in real-time playback is lacking when compared to Edius.

[Craig Parkes]

I'll admit that I haven't done a lot of work with Premiere recently - but as I pointed out earlier adoption in the professional market is due to market share - and market share is due to necessity of use - and Final Cut became a necessary solution to HD (due to it's massive array of included codecs more than anything else.)

All editing software programs have problems - non of the problems you list are actually deal breakers in a properly managed Final Cut environment.

The only reason Final Cut is more prevalent is because it had the right array of abilities at the right time and became the choice of editing suite when shooting on particular types of camera and format - (Previously DVCProHD - currently RED - there will possibly be another format around the corner the Apple is an early adopter of that can give them an edge in the professional market).

Anyone who argues that professional editors don't cut on Premiere isn't relaying the good or bad about Premiere - they are simply saying that in a purely editorial environment Premiere doesn't have enough market share to be a dominant force.

Some of those issues are historical, and Premiere has obviously caught up in some areas - but if it was a better solution for people in the field than Final Cut, at an earlier date, it would have been adopted.

Trust me - the professional world tries everything to get a solution - but if you are first to market with that solution and you prove to be robust enough for most needs you can get a foothold and stay there as long as you don't drop the ball.

Quicktime is a huge edge for Apple - because in the professional world, you don't WANT to be dealing with a tonne of different file formats. Having a standard like Quicktime wrappers that allow multiple machines to edit is an advantage. Being able to cut one or two native formats in another editing suite is nowhere near as advantageous as having Quicktime Pro support integrated and the massive array of codecs that come with Final Cut.

Of course - if Apple happens to drop the ball on Quicktime for the proapp users (which their latest releases have come pretty close to doing due to their move towards the consumer market support of iTunes, Apple TV and iPhone etc) them people could begin to migrate away.

Point is - I'm edit suite agnostic in principle, I'll cut on anything. But if I want to work in industry now, I know I need to be able to use Final Cut and Avid.

Most places will ALSO have Premiere, because they are almost certain to have Photoshop and After Effects - and if I was wanting to learn motion graphics and a bit of editing CS3 is the obvious choice.

But if I want to edit professionally - Final Cut and Avid is where it is at right now for the historical reasons I have listed - but all things are subject to change.

[Herman Van Deventer]

My humble choice after 15 years of "Broadcast" Editing -

Adobe Premiere on Steroids - Prospect 4k backed by Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.

My personal opinion / The differences between the leading editing software packages in HD land is uniforml likely to be more subjective to the hardware performance factors and the codec war.

The leading editing packages has standarised to a very well balanced scenario.
The emphasis should be on your hardware and codec "performance"
The few differences between "bells and whistle's" and "hype" involved can hardly influence
the ALCHEMY OF EDITING.

Alfred Hitchcock : "What is editing ? You take the end of a strip of film and then you paste
it to the end of another piece of film. Then you put it it into a machine where light goes through it onto a screen and you look at it and then you cry."

Greetings from the Third World.

[Nathan Quattrini]

A couple of things to throw in the mix.

1. Restating the obvious. The end product is all that matters in all jobs. The person you work for doesn't care what you have to go through to make it, they just see what you made. If you give a man a hammer, wood, and nails doesn't mean he can build a house.

2. Everyone starts somewhere. I began 'editing' and 'video making' on a VHS camera when I was 12, and by making frame by frame flipbooks with little note pads. So if I make something now should I be ridiculed for starting out how I did? Of course not, everyone starts somewhere.

3. I encourage you to learn any NLE you can get your hands on. Avid, FCP, Premiere, and any others floating out there. Why? Why not. The more you know, the more versatile an editor you become, the more jobs you can take on and not have to hear "Sorry we are using "NLE Q" which you don't know".

[Mike Teutsch]

Basically all of these NLE wars/discussions are just format/platform wars. It's sad, but it is the truth. Now that Premiere is available for MAC, it may change somewhat. It's a great suite of programs.

Mike

[Eric Knopp]

" but I don't know a single professional (or even aspiring professional) editor that uses Adobe Premier."

Somebody say, "Superman Returns" ??

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/customers/