Premiere Pro (from an FCP user's perspective)
 

I've been working for a couple of weeks now with Premiere Pro 2. I just wanted to offer up a couple of comments, since I've spent most of my time working on a Mac until now.

I'll say up front that I don't care for PCs much. It seems like they're too finicky about configuration files and stuff that doesn't have anything to do with what I'm trying to do. I kind of got backed into working with a PC because I've shot a bunch of 24P footage with an HD-100 and Apple doesn't seem too interested in making Final Cut Studio work well with it. Also, I really like the Cineform codec and working with it in Premiere Pro seemed like a good option for me.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that Adobe's image processing features are really bowling me over. I still don't care for aspects of the way Premiere handles as an editing platform and I think LiveType is about a thousand times better than Premiere's titler or the Boris software I bought. I'd give anything to be using LiveType with Premiere. As far as taking the image and tweaking it, though, there's no comparison, IMO. Premiere gives you a lot of the same tools that are available in Photoshop. Tools like the Shadow/Highlight tool and the way you can deal with issues of contrast and color correction are very intuitive for a long-time Photoshop user. I wish the scopes were better in Premiere, but I'm getting results that I'd never get in Final Cut Pro.

I don't work for Adobe or anything and I'd honestly still rather be working in Final Cut Pro, or at least working with LiveType, but I wanted to share this with other Mac users who may not have had any firsthand experience with Premiere. I hadn't messed with it in years...since Premiere 6.5, I think. It's a really nice package, IMO. I'm big enough to admit it. ;-)

-Rob

You might find that the text animation features of After Effects work so well with Premiere Pro (especially when you purchase the Production Studio and get "Dynamic Link") that you would actually prefer it to LiveType.

If you think of the Production Studio with an NLE, Special Effects, Audio and DVD programs as one package, it changes things a bit.

If there is anything we can do to ease you through this transition, please let us know.

Well, I also bought After Effects 7, but the learning curve there is a lot more steep than LiveType, which is really pretty intuitive. I went through the tutorial stuff that came with it, but I still can't really make it do much for me. See, that's the other thing about the Mac stuff, Motion is extremely easy to use. The interface and user experience is very intuitive. Same thing with DVD Studio Pro. You can pretty much look at it and figure out how to use it, pulling up the help file when something just doesn't seem obvious enough. After Effects, for me anyway, is a nearly impenetrable mess. I'll probably end up buying some training materials, not being able to understand what they're getting at and using the basic titling package in Premiere with results that don't meet my expectations. Heh...just to be absolutely honest about it.

Premiere Pro, though...that's some set of image processing tools. It's really doing the job a lot better than I'm used to being able to do it on my own. I've been very happy overall. So far I've only been doing color timing on HD-100 footage in 720p24. Soon I'm going to start work on the exteriors, which were all shot on 35mm film and telecined at 1080p24. I'm really looking forward to seeing what kind of results I can get. I'm pretty confident about it. It's so similar to using Photoshop that I can pretty much get a handle on what an image needs in no time at all.

-Rob

I agree that After Effects takes a lot of training. But, using the text animation can be taught in minutes. I'll bet there is a tutorial out there for it somewhere.

If you really want a good grounding in AE, go for the Total Training DVDs. There are none better.

Robert, After Effects is a deep, deep program and indeed you are probably over-whelmed. Its not a mess though. As a long time After Effects user I can attest that version 7 is just a great piece of software, but you're dealing with the "Photoshop of video" so it may be a bit much off the bat. There are lots of free tutorials. There is also an excellent text called "Creating Motion Graphics" by Chris and Trish Meyer, but they take the approach of teaching you the whole program, not just creating text. Thing of it is, if you start to learn After Effects you'll realize there is a whole different level you could be taking your video to, and you might really start to enjoy the depth that After Effects has to offer. My advice would be just open the program up once a day, and spend a little time playing around with it, like even just 15 minutes. Also, when you look at some of the on-line tutorials, try finding some that just look really easy and straight forward, even if what the tutorial does isn't necessarily something you are interested in. It will help you get familiar with how the program works. Its a great piece of software.