Editing Program
 

Hi everyone

I just wanted to get some opinions on the best editing system to buy. Well, I guess what is the best value? I recently graduated from college where I used Adobe Premiere. At the television station, I work at we use AVID. I was going to purchase the Final Cut Studio after several recommendations. I have to buy a computer, monitor, and the editing software so the money to get Final Cut is adding up. Although I'd be willing to splurge if it was the absolute best. I was going to go with the powerMac G5 but I wondered how much ram I would need and if I could go with a less expensive setup instead. This software is being purchased for weddings and maybe a few other projects. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!

The people who use FCP will say it is the best. The people who use Premiere will say it is the best. The people who use Avid will say it is the best. Personally, I use Vegas (naturally, it is the best! :-)).

You really need to use the one that best suits you.

Hi Hilary,

Ed gave you some great advice. NLE software choices will bring out a lot of emotional responses from their users. I use Edius from Canopus and I do about 90% weddings. Retail price is around $599 and you will get tons of real time performance out of an off the shelf computer. I currently use Edius on a tower system built for editing as well as a two year old off the shelf laptop from Best Buy. Both systems work great with Edius.

If you are looking for a good value you can spend $1000-$1500 on a computer and about $599 for Edius and be well on your way to a cost effective editing system.

The only thing to consider in this equation is HDV. Edius will edit HDV, but you will need a fast computer. I don't know the details, but for HDV you should be looking at a fast dual core with a gig or two of ram. For regular DV footage, a P4 with 512 ram will really cook.

You can download a free and full version of Edius. It is good for 30 days and is a great way to try out the software without spending your hard earned money just to see if you like it.

I'll agree that you've heard some wise comments already. Most everyone has some sort of emotional attachment to their NLE. It can be broken, but usually at great cost. I was a Premiere user for about 4 years until I was introduced to Vegas. Once I got the hang of it I never looked back. I'm not here to tout the virtues of one NLE over another (though Vegas is the best). I just wanted to say that you should pick one that you like. Mark gave a great tip. Download the demos of many different NLE's and try them out yourself. I'd recommend at least checking out the following.

Sony Vegas: (http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/dow...p2.asp?did=583)

Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0: (http://www.adobe.com/go/trypremiere_pro_win)

Canopus Edius: (http://www.canopus.com/products/EDIUSPro/index.php)

for the student price of final cut studio ($800 i think), you'll get final cut pro, dvd studio pro, soundtrack, motion. for the price i would say it'll be hard to beat. soundtrack is just spectacular to clean up audio. dvd studio pro give you the great authoring capabilities. motion is just icing on the cake. is it obvious that i use final cut pro?

For the price and features, I don't think you can beat Final Cut Express HD. I started with that and have been using it for almost a year. You get all the features you need to get started for only $299. It does allow for HD editing plus it works in conjunction with iDVD, Live Type, and Soundtrack. I have a G5 with 2 MB RAM and have had no problems. This is definitely the way to go for a Mac user just starting out.

I've used Final Cut Studio and Premiere Pro. If I had to choose between the two, I would pick Final Cut anyday.

I've been a Mac user since '85, so naturally I'm a FCP user as well. (Started out with FCP2 in '01.) As you probably know, FCP is no longer a stand alone app -- it comes included with the Final Cut Studio package, which, as Yoochul wrote above, is quite an amazing deal, even at the full retail price.

I've never used the other video editing programs, except for playing with the downloadable trial versions before I purchased FCP2, so no comment on those.

FCP has a bit of a learning curve, so I wouldn't recommend buying it on Friday, taping a wedding on Saturday, and promising to have the final product completed within a week. Maybe two weeks would be reasonable. ;)

Anyway, FC Studio is a real pleasure to work with, and I'm still using a G4 with 2GB memory, OS 10.4 (Tiger), and a whole lotta gigs of hard drive space. Obviously not as fast a G5, but still adequate for me for the time being.

just wondering...
 

I'm wondering if somebody can tell me what the actual benefit of FCP is over Premiere Pro?

I find that there is nothing I can't do in Premiere...everytime I have a creative idea, I hop straight on to Photoshop CS2, After Effects and Premiere, and get it done no probs. I find it so quick to do as well (colour corrections, fx, audio, layers...), and i get my full edits done in less than 2 weeks of evenings.

I'm not saying Premiere is better wotsoever, I simply want someone to list its benefits/comparisons...I know i should have compared demos of NLEs before i payed up but i'm a fan of Adobe products so it made sense

thanks

p.s. I hope this doesn't start a PC vs MAC debate, AAH! :)

i use fcp so i can't tell you the differences between premiere and fcp. however when more and more directors/editors are going away from the avid route, they (correct me if i'm wrong) are leaning more and more to the fcp realm instead of premiere. I'm not a professional but there is a reason why editors are choosing fcp. sorry i wasn't much help here.

does premiere do multicam editing? is that one difference between the two?

yooch

I don't see this as going off track as a Mac vs PC discussion. There used to be a Premier version for the Mac, and I suppose there probably still is. Wasn't there also a Mac version of Avid?

I would think a plus for Premier is that the cost of the basic computer to run it on is a lot less than a Mac. On the other hand, the same company that makes Final Cut Studio also makes the computer it runs on as well as the operating system that drives it.

As I metioned in my earlier post, I'm running the latest version of FC Studio and Mac OS on what many would call an obsolete computer -- a G4 purchased in 2000. Even so, I don't even remember when was the last time the Mac crashed while video editing. Maybe last year once. I'd like to think that's because the entire system is one tightly integrated package. It's not an Adobe program driven by a Microsoft OS on hardware from who-knows-where.

But, as long as I'm typing here, I did have one thing to add for Hilary to consider. It seems to me there would be a big advantage to using the same editing software at home that you use at work. Working with it at both ends could only make you better at both jobs.

Tom,

There is no Mac version of Premiere.

Yoochul ,
Premiere DOES multi-cam editing. Also, a few editors are switching to FCP only because of it's popularity. I have worked with almost every major NLE and find PPRO and FCP to be pretty much the same. Avid and Vegas on the other hand are two entirely different apps.

Also, if you plan on sticking with Windows, the Production Studio price is hard to beat. You get Photoshop, Illustrator and AE. Now that is a good deal!

Tom nailed it on the head and Aanarav made another few good points.

The reason why professionals (whether film or video) use FCP is because it has a great toolset and it doesn't crash. Premiere Pro, while being made to emulate FCP, is very buggy and unstable. I do not mean to offend any Adobe users, as I still use After Effects and Photoshop. But Premiere is NOT a film level tool yet. Video, yes. Film, no. FCP is a fine program that works the way it should. I would recommend it as well, although I'm a PC user so I don't use FCP currently. I didn't notice that you were leaning towards it in your initial post, which is why I discussed PC based NLE's in my earlier post. If you know AVID you may want to look into them as it is nice to not have to relearn an NLE interface (though features are generally the same).

I have been using Premiere Pro since the first day it was released and use it daily for broadcast and various other projects and it rarely crashes. If you know how to setup and optimize your PC (and it does take time), it won't crash. We have an old render system with Premiere 6.5 running great for the past 4 years.

The main problem lies with the Windows OS and not with the NLEs running on the Windows platform. To get any NLE to work on XP, it takes a lot of trial and error and computer knowledge that most editors prefer not to know.

While I don't want this post to spiral downward into an endless Premiere vs The World debate, I thought that a comment might be helpful. I'd say I am proficient with computer hardware and software. I've built all of my systems from the ground up, with clean installs of XP, along with all of the latest patches to Premiere Pro, up to and including PPro 1.5. While it would run well for a good percentage of the time, I would also experience random and seemingly unexplained crashes. I don't mean to say that these were all Premiere's fault, as there is truth to your statement that Windows XP is not perfect.

However, I installed Vegas 6 about 9 months ago on a machine that I had not freshly installed XP on and it has worked great since. No tweaking. No optimizing. Nothing but using the update to version 6.0d. While I don't mean to belittle Premiere, it's difficult to say that it less crash prone than Vegas or FCP. I haven't used Edius so I can't compare it. I'm just talking from experience here and like I said I don't mean to start a war. I only intend to provide information for someone looking to make an informed decision.

In the interest of fairness, I'll reiterate that Premiere is just fine as an NLE and will usually work just fine. It was the original NLE I learned on. I just prefer others now after trying alternatives.