Mac User - Rough Times.
 

What's the learning curve like?
i.e. Os9 to 10 and Premiere to Final Cut...

Dumped by Adobe. Mac User. Time to move.

Danke.

There's no way for anyone to give you an accurate reply. The amount of time and energy required to make the transitions will depend on many factors such as how much dedicated time you will be able to devote to learning, how receptive you are to learning new tricks and how well you mastered the previous platform and tools. The concepts arre the same on both fronts.

But it's not as though you have a practical long-term choice. Just dive in. The water's fine.

I switched from the Mac version of Premiere to FCP 3 around 2 years ago. For me it was a welcome change. I found Premiere to be unresponsive and disliked much of the user interface. As I learned FCP it was like a breath of fresh air, with a visually appealing interface and much smoother response.

As for OSX, well I'm one of those OS 9 holdouts with 3 machines none of which are running OSX yet. None of my software really takes advantage of it at this point, no compelling reason to switch - would rather boot into OS9 than run in Classic. Maybe by next Spring I'll be looking at the G5's, OSX and FCP 4? But I've used OSX enough to feel pretty comfortable, and I'm an old unix type, not afraid to write shell scripts or even system software in C, so I look forward to my eventual upgrade.

I think you will be pleasantly surprised when you upgrade to FCP, and shortly afterwards you'll wonder how you managed to put up with Adobe's bloatware for so long...

;-)

Anyone I've ever gotten to switch to OS X has demanded why I didn't make them do it sooner. Almost everyone I know that uses OS X hates OS 9. There are a couple of rough edges still, but 10.3 smooths those out pretty thoroughly. It is the best operating system I've ever used. If you have an open mind and are flexible, you won't have a problem. Most of the same tricks work. X still uses the desktop metaphor. I feel that most of the changes just add tools for efficiency.

You will really like the multitasking abilities of OS X. You can set FCP to render a long sequence and browse the web or work in Photoshop while you're waiting. This will be especially apparent if you are going to run it on a dual processor machine.

FCP and Premiere are kind of similar. One major difference would be capturing. Check out ken stone's final cut pro website (google search it) and read up on capturing and know how to avoid timecode breaks. Final Cut is a bit more intuitive and takes less mouse clicks and key presses to do the same things.

OS9 has some advantages over OS X, and it depends on how stable each OS is. If OS9 is rock solid for you then I see no reason to switch (especially if all your software isn't OS X). OS X was really confusing when I switched over from OS 9.

From what I understand, the creators of Premiere are the same as FCP. They just took everything that sucked about Premiere and fixed them, putting the new improvements into FCP making it that much better and easier to use.

Kevin,

OSX follows the traditional Mac logic, so it'll be a comfortable change. I think you'll be happy with it.

Go to the Apple site and click the OSX tab. They have some QT videos that show how the system works.

Thanks for the replies.

I pretty much know OS9 inside out in that if there was a crash or failure, i could pretty much resolve this 80-90% of the time (eg. dig into the system folder and resolve extension conflicts, fix probs with preferences, memory issues, rebuilding dt, disk errors... etc) which saves me a lot of critical time and money. I have a team of about 4 running about 6 machines... How stable is the new OS?

We do a broad range of creative work so migrating to the new OS means upgrading about 20 separate apps... Haha...now that's a headache. Not to mention the lag in productivity x 4 with the learning curve.

I had a light dabble with Final Cut 1 a while back and it does feel a lot more stable. The "preview-render" in Premeire (6.0) is irritatingly time-wasting. I am a die-hard fan of After Effects though. Any user feedback on the new "Soundtrack" and "Shake"(expensive)?

Lastly, what codec do you use to archive final digital comps?
I usually render Quicktimes - Animation codec, 100% with uncompressed 48KHz stereo audio.

RE: Stability

I haven't had a single crash since Mac OS 10.2 was released about a year ago.

RE: Soundtrack

I make electronic music, so I might be a little biased, but Soundtrack strikes me as being overly consumer-oriented. It is nice if you want to make some filler music to use in place of something else while you wait for it to get recorded or something, but for the most part almost everything that comes out of that program immediately sounds like it came out of that program. Even with the number of loops they provide, the selection just gets old. Fast

RE: Shake

Shake costs an arm and a leg. And with good reason. Shake is one of those applications that is so powerful and broad in the scope of things it can do that even doing really simple stuff can seem complicated. The learning curve is pretty daunting. I'd recommend you pay someone who gets paid to use it so you can sit with him/her for a few hours and just watch the workflow. It' a bit unusual. Definitely not very mac-like (hopefully Apple will do a big de-suck of the interface for the 4.0 release). It can do some amazing stuff though. Check out the video demos on their website.

Kevin...

I moved some of my Macs over to OS 10 and it worked out quite well over the past several months.

As for my editing system, it's mixed between my Media 100 editor, currently on OS 9, and other applications on OS 10. Hoping to move it all over to OS 10 by next week.

The learning curve wasn't that steep. Just had to get used to some of the different aspects of OS 10. For example, there aren't any extensions as it's known in OS 9. The finder rarely, if ever, crashes. If an application goes down, it doesn't take the entire system down with it.

Be sure to get the current version of a disk utility, such as Tech Tool or Disk Warrior, just in case.

Overall, it's quite nice. Does take getting used to, however.

Good luck!
Dean Sensui
Base Two Productions