What can Premiere do that FCP can't?
 

I'm a long time FCP user and have just picked up a copy of CS3 Premiere Pro. I need Encore to author Blu-ray discs, and of course it only comes with Premiere. But now that I have it, I wonder if there are any tricks, effects, or tools that Premiere adds.

Premiere and FCP are so similar its amazing. And yet there are subtle things like the integration of other software that builds the differences. Also, in my opinion, Premiere CS3 handles multi-cam projects MUCH better than FCP, which is completely backwards of what I would've guessed. After Effects also is very tightly integrated and live changes can get made without rendering.

With that said, FCP seems like a more solid program than premiere. In my humble opinion.

long time Premiere user
 

I have been a long time premiere user since premiere 4.0, but about 3 months ago I switched to FCP. Things I like about Premiere is the way it works with the Keyframes. The interface is much easier to use. So far I have not found an easy away to do Keyframes in FCP. I was surprised that the Multi-cam is better in premiere but I have read that on other posts as well. If you use AE a lot then the Dynamic link is a good function. but with that said if all your doing is making Text fly over a picture and maybe have the picture do something I would say use motion. I have found that the integration in the FCP studio 2 is pretty good too. A postive thing about FCP is all the codec's that it has already built in. I am doing a lot with XDCAM and HDV now and so the native codec is nice. That was one of my major reasons for switching

Coming from exactly the opposite direction, I'm a long-time FCP editor, I have to say that FCP only treats one file format natively: QuickTime. HDV and XDCAM are not accessed natively but converted to QuickTime first. I know, it seems like splitting hairs but Premiere, and After Effects, can actually access different native formats, no QT conversion required. In fact Motion .motn files are actually QuickTime files in disguise. Wanna verify it? Copy a .motn file and change the extension to .mov and you'll be able to import it in AE.

FCP allows for film workflow which Premiere simply cannot do. Then there are countless niceties in FCP which Premiere doesn't offer - try to remove or disable effects from a hundred of clips on timeline. You've got to do this one by one in Premiere. Applying CC from current clip to first or second clip ahead or backward in timeline (cool for dialogue CC) - in Premiere, you've again do it by hand, CTRL-C and CTRL-V'ing your way through the timeline. Trimming and editing solely with keyboard is also not exactly possible in PPro.

And then there's the stability and reliability thing. PPro will slow to a crawl when working with several hours of footage broken into hundreds of clips. And it crashes even on Adobe certified systems. Not to say that FCP is perfect, but Adobe has a lot of room to improve.

Dynamic link with After Effects and accelerated editing with Cineform.

Premiere can import sequences of images, FCP cannot. There are workaround but this is a pretty glaring gap in FCP's feature list

What do you mean by that exactly?

My workaround is to use another sequence were I do corrections when the amount is too high. Maybe there is a trick?

I had stability problems before, and they turned out to be related a lot to all the other software installed before or after the Premiere installation.
I use now a clean OS, and installed only the programs which I really need. Watch out for Norton Anti-virus for example.
Pretty stable now. Premiere also needs enough harddisk c: free, even if you route your temporally files to another drive. It still creates Gigabytes of data on the C: drive. The more you edit the more it eats your C:drive. It did not know why my drive always got less diskspace, until I found a setting to clean it up in the adobe menu.

In Premiere Pro you can edit audio at the sample level, not just at 30 frames per second. FCP could not do that the last time I looked (which admittedly has been a few years).

The worst thing about premiere
 

I think the worst thing about premiere is that it has a bad reputation in the industry.
People actually look down on you for running premiere, inwhich case i always have to defend myself. "Why aren't you using Final cut". Honestly there is not much difference in premiere and Final cut on the software level as they can basically do the same things... But the difference is not the software, its the hardware.
Unfortunity the thing about premiere, being on a PC, means it can be, and often is installed and run on sub par systems. This means its common to see premiere not able to perform like it can. On a mac, with closed hardware specs, Final cut versions are limited to the machine there installed on so you cant install a version that wont run so well.
All of adobes other apps seem to be industry standards, except premiere.
This bad rep probably also comes from previous versions up to 6.5 in which were not as serious as the pro versions we have now. Since the pro versions they pretty much are very similar to Final cut.

the main advantage of premiere is the huge base of plugins allowing all sort of feature to be added.(color correction, special effect, exporting and so on....)
So you do not need to learn a new program just for doing a small thing.