FCP X vs Premiere Pro

It depends on the job and whether I'm editing on my gear or if I'm paid to sit in an edit bay. Some small stuff I just keep in premiere
 
J Davis said:
Frank, I don;t know what you edit with or what edit situations you are in but smart rendering is without a doubt one of the most important tools in a high pressure work environment. I recently cut stuff for Toyota, Hasten and Canon. In each situation the final edits go thought about 20 rounds of tweaks and changes as it must run the gauntlet to be approved by about 10 separate groups of people. Each one of those asks for a small change which means another export / render.

If you have a 10 minute timeline of which you only alter 4 seconds for one of those rounds of changes you do not want to be re-rendering the entire timeline again. And this is just on 10 minute piece, some of the regular work I do is 40+ minutes.
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Fair enough, I don´t have that kind of situations very often, but on the other hand,
exporting from the timeline is mostly - at least - realtime on my workstation, sometimes even faster.
So I can live wit that.

Frank
 
Like J I do not just use one NLE program , I use Edius Pro 6.01 and Adobe CS5 ,but will be which to CS6 on the next project. These days there is no one package that does everything better than the other , you have to find which works for you in your work environment. The best advise many have given is down load the trial versions of the different products and see if they work for you , even Lightworks Studio v11 which is free.
 
J Davis said:
Frank, I don;t know what you edit with or what edit situations you are in but smart rendering is without a doubt one of the most important tools in a high pressure work environment. I recently cut stuff for Toyota, Hasten and Canon. In each situation the final edits go thought about 20 rounds of tweaks and changes as it must run the gauntlet to be approved by about 10 separate groups of people. Each one of those asks for a small change which means another export / render.

If you have a 10 minute timeline of which you only alter 4 seconds for one of those rounds of changes you do not want to be re-rendering the entire timeline again. And this is just on 10 minute piece, some of the regular work I do is 40+ minutes.
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In those cases you just enable Premiere to use "preview files". Then it will not render anything that it has already rendered.

"Smart rendering" is kinda pointless nowadays.
 
Today I did some tests with GH2 native footage in FCX, Premiere and Smoke in a MAC PRO.
The winner was Premiere, I could edit very smooth, playback previews in realtime and I tested 4 PIPs of GH2 footage playing in realtime, render was pretty fast too.
Personally, I don't like the Premiere settings adjustments, keyframes, etc, but the CS6 interface is a lot better and performance is outstanding.
Smoke is very nice and handle footage better than FCPX, lots of control, nice features, but maybe it is ideal for a music video or a TV spot.
FCPX has nice features, editing can be very fast, but I miss the project control, many presets, but lost custom adjustments in many situations. Performance is not close to Premiere.

Thanks,
Ulisses
 
Premiere Pro is an easier transition from FCP7 IMHO. FCPX is a whole different ballgame what with merged tracks and what not.
I never figured out FCPX but i used Premiere intuitively from the get go.
 
About the smart rendering, it's a great feature, and I miss it a lot. It's not in FCP X either. FCP X has some smart rendering going on in the sense that if you for instance, render a color correction, remove it, and put it back, it doesn't have to render again.

But I could cut XDCAM footage in FCP 7 and have it export very quickly, and FCP X is taking me 5 times as long for exactly the same export.
I reported all my tests here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/final-cut-pro-x/508191-big-issue-fcp-x-only-outputting-uncompressed.html

About the question: Premiere or FCP X.
Both have very interesting directions. I first rejected FCP X, and bought Production Suite CS5.5 with the Switch deal. I didn't touch Premiere though, I still hated a lot of the interface (and this is coming from someone who started with Premiere, transitioned to Final Cut and loved FCP a lot more). But CS 6 looks a much cleaner interface, and has many interesting features. As a suite, it's pretty unbeatable.

But FCP X has some very great features too, and Apple has been doing a lot of important upgrades. I gave the software a new chance with FCP 10.0.3, and I cursed a lot but also had a lot of "aha" moments (which is still where I'm at).
I'm not too found of buying another Adobe upgrade again, so I'll wait and see. Apple has some very good upgrades coming to FCP X (R3D support, multiple viewers - whatever that implementation will be - and multichannel audio editing, native MXF support, ...)
Yes Apple botched the FCP X launch in many ways, but they got me some credit after seeing how much they did 'right' with the old FCP suite. It will be interesting too see where this all will be in a year.
 
Matt Harris said:
Premiere Pro is an easier transition from FCP7 IMHO. FCPX is a whole different ballgame what with merged tracks and what not.
I never figured out FCPX but i used Premiere intuitively from the get go.
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Yes, PP is definitely looking more like the conservative approach; tracks make it look and feel like FCP7.
But once someone "gets FCPX" it is a very efficient and powerful NLE. FCPX has tools that are quite unique: skimming, auditions, the magnetic timeline, its multicam-mode and the keyword-bins. Depending on your projects these tools can become invaluable to you fast.

I suggest those who are on the fence really take a look at some tutorials about FCPX and give it some time. You can jump into PP6 right away, but maybe FCPX would have been the better choice for you in the long term.
 
NVIDIA and premiere make a very compelling case for that combo. that, and i also am wondering j davis if you're used to smart rendering why not just render the timeline and always export using previews, that would be 1 generation loss at best, likely not noticeable to the eye, and if that's not enough then i would ask why the footage isn't starting off as or being transcoded to a master format before edit begins.
 
I think they both have their strengths, but for short form I definitely would go with FCPX. The final render speed of FCPX kills Premiere for me. FCPX is insanely fast at final export, I've never seen anything like it. Editing wise they both have things I like but I'm getting used to FCPX more and more. Premiere is nice, I guess I just don't have interest.
 
I must say I was reluctant to hop on the Adobe train for editing as I was an avid Final Cut user since I went to college in 2000. When I decided to switch to CS5.5 I didn't know what to expect and found myself still switching to Final Cut 7 to do all my editing. When CS6 came out I decided to see what FCPX and Premiere had to offer and found that I liked CS6 a whole lot more. It seemed like a natural progression from FCP 7 without having to wrap my brain around something completely new. It added things that I missed in FCP 7 and things that I wished where in FCP 7 (and CS5.5 for that matter) like Warp Stabilizer and various other tools. I tried the 30 day trial of FCPX and found it never stuck with me as an editing choice. I honestly missed not editing on Premiere. I agree with a lot of people that say the platform is important, but not as important as having the skill set and/or storytelling ability to be an editor. But as a whole, I think Premiere is starting to make a case for being on of the best editing software at an affordable price, especially with the great integration with After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Photoshop, etc....
 
Which NLE to use depends on personal preference, industry niche, and client need. There ain't no "best." They all do the same thing which is cut video.

I prefer FCP X for the editing speed and the new thinking of the trackless timeline and magnetic timeline. Very cool.

If I don;t have a deadline and can edit leisurely, I like Lightworks traditional workflow. And it's only $60.
 
I am not all that hung up on FCPX vs. PP. I like Mac, and I liked FCP. I have been using it since version 1.25. FCP X weirds some folks out as they think the magnetic timeline is something like bad magic. In practicality, now matter what NLE you use, you have a main video track and anything and any video layer on top of that track will be the one you are watching. You can still overlay any other video track on top of the magnetic track. It just makes the connected clip sticky so that if you add something else to the mix or trim in various places, whatever is on top stays stuck to that point where you connected it. You can still move the connected clip.

Beyond that, it is still a matter of edit points, in/out, edits, sound tracks, transitions, etc. Granted, there are certain issues with the way they set up the handling of media, but once you understand that this too is very manageable, you really won't find FCP X all that bad. Their are some other short-comings, but they all have some issues. The only thing that bugs the heck out of me is that Apple does nothing for the towers. Their latest upgrade offering on the towers was an total failure. The lack of thunderbolt was ludicrous and their insistence that thunderbolt not be available via an expansion card is crazy. Throw in the soldered RAM on the top of the line retina display MBP, and I will just stick with my 17 inch MBP. Apple is either planning a killer offering in a tower or they have lost their collective minds in terms of the professional market. Perhaps too many of the folks at Apple are going retro to the original idea of a Mac that could not be upgraded.

Creative Suite 6 is very promising, and will likely gain me as a customer if I switch to a PC. HP has some terrific workstations as well as laptops. I see this as a viable move. At the end of the day it is all about the creative vision and skill in slicing and placing the snippets that make up the piece into a decent story, not the hardware or software to get there.

Sincerely,
Bill
 
nwstudios said:
Apple not making a "real" desktop computer other than the Mac Pro was a major factor for me.
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It's disappointing to be stuck with old tech in the Mac Pro. Hopefully the new redesigned Mac Pro will be worth the wait, and speed up FCPX considerably.
 
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