Thinking about Premiere Pro ...
 

Hey Everyone,

I'm thinking about switching to Premiere Pro from Final Cut Pro. I'm educated on Final Cut Pro, so that's just the program I've always used for video editing. The problem has always been ... I'm definetly a PC guy. My girlfriend had an old iBook that I've been using Final Cut Pro on. But now, she has a new iMac and I just bought a new PC. Instead of bothering her to use the iMac for Final Cut Pro, I figure that I might as well make the switch to Premiere Pro CS3.

My current system specs are:

Windows XP Professional
19 inch Widescreen Monitor
Intel Dual Processors (3GHz)
1GB RAM (should I upgrade this to 2GB?)
120GB Hard drive
NVidea GeForce 8800 w/ 640MB Video Ram (I don't think you can get a better card than this, look it up)

I'm assuming Premiere Pro would run fine on this? Also, do I need a video capture card? I thought that you can capture video over USB 2.0 but I've never seemed to have any success compared to firewire. Can anyone shine some light on this? Anything else I should be worried about in the transition? Also, I have a bunch of projects and footage from final cut pro on an external hard drive. Would I basically be better off just getting a new seperate external hard drive? I'm guessing most of that footage will be unusable with premiere pro.

Thanks.

Matt:

What are you editing. Fine for DV, though going to 2gb memory will help. HDV will be okay there to. AMDs outdid the old Intel dual cores, but the New Core Duo from Intel are now the beasts of burden. Definitely 2GB mem for HDV. To compare, I am editing and rendering HDV on an AMD 3800 dual core, 2 gigs mem, cheap MB. You should have a decent video card too, as I understand Premiere uses video card to work too. I have generic 256 mb ATI X700, getting old already, but works well. Oops. Saw you have the big Video card. That should do it...

For now, I'm just editing standard DV. But, eventually I'd like to get my hands on the Canon XH-A1 or something similar. Also, how do you go about capturing footage, is it over USB 2.0, or do I need something else?

My understanding is interface is very similar to FCP, according to those who have used both.

HDV is captured by Firewire (1394), just like miniDV so if your computer has that, you don't need a separate card. For HDV, PPro2 will not display the video in the capture window (view it on the camcorder LCD), the frame advance buttons are greyed out and don't work, and batch capture isn't available. Same tape stock, same cables. HDV is more highly compressed than DV so the GB/hour is about the same. Because of the interframe (GOP, or Group of Pictures) compression, it is more processor intensive to edit and more prone to generational loss. So a lot of folks use an intermediate codec with intraframe compression (and, for example, Cineform AspectHD allows batch capture), but you can edit native HDV with a reasonably fast computer. The Core2 computers are definitely recommended these days, but your dual-processor 3GHz ought to do OK unless you're going to do large, complex projects or After Effects work, in which case it'll work, but be frustratingly slow. Another GB of RAM wouldn't hurt.

Not sure about converting FCP-generated video files. Maybe somebody else knows about that.

I don't think my computer has a firewire port, can I just buy a PCI card that has one?

Sure! - $10-$15 at any of the online stores.