C300: FCPX vs Premiere Pro

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seanarmada

Well-known member
Sorry if I'm repeating from another thread.

I just purchased a new, top-end Mac Book Pro. I realize it isn't a replacement for a high end desktop setup, but it should get the job done reasonably well. I'm also working off an external SSD in addition to the internal SSD.

The biggest disappointment for me with the upgrade is that Premiere Pro is not that much faster. Even with 12-bit 444 1080 footage, it bogs down nearly the same as my years older MBP.

The massive performance gains I've been hearing about from FCPX have been piquing my interest. The last few versions have also been addressing a lot of issues - better colour grading, improvements to the timeline system, etc.

I'm curious if anyone here is actively using the most recent versions of FCPX for C300 MKII or even C200 footage. Any thoughts?

Sean
 
Late 2013 MBP 2.6GHz i7 latest FCPX edits C300 II 12-bit RGB 444 and 10-bit 4K smoothly, including transitions when set up for "Performance". With "Quality" active, transitions stutter a bit. FCPX does a lot of background rendering, and thus stuttery things can get smoother after background renders finish. Having FCPX around tends to be useful, especially for the price. For super quick edits, FCPX is really good, and with the latest updates for color correction (including curves finally haha!), one could switch over from PP CC and not miss Lumetri too much.

For more complex green screen / compositing & VFX in 4K, I use a PC with a 6950X (10-core), 64GB RAM, Samsung 960 Pro M.2, GTX 1080 with PP CC. A high-end PC provides the highest level of performance vs anything available on the Mac (including Hackintoshes), likely due to better GFX/drivers optimizations for Windows.
 
I've been a FCP X user since X released and even edited a feature length doc on it a couple years back. I haven't done a ton of C300 MKII or C200 editing in it but from what I've seen, it's been fine. I have done a lot of tests with my C200 in 4K RAW and FCP X plays it in real time, even with an effect or two added, on my Mac Pro 2013 (I have the mid-range, 6 core 3GB x 2 Graphics card config with 32GB of memory).

You're always going to get varying results based on how you use a specific computer or piece of software but from what I've seen, FCP X usually runs better on newer Mac hardware and echoing Sean's thoughts above, Premiere tends to be better optimized on PC (I'm making that statement having not touched any version of Premiere in 15 years so make of that what you will).
 
Thanks for your feedback guys! Those PC specs made me drool a little ;) Good to know you're working on more substantial projects on FCPX. I don't do any greenscreen/VFX work so that requirement is out for me.
 
I'm running fcp x on a Mac Pro 2013. Same as Dustin. I don't have a problem with C300 II footage of any variety even in mxf.
 
FCPX is really well optimised for Macs (doh!) and for AMD graphics (which is in all new macs), Premier favours Nvidia graphics. You should give FCPX a whirl. Chances are it’ll handle better than Premier on your machine.
 
dmitrizigany said:
FCPX is really well optimised for Macs (doh!) and for AMD graphics (which is in all new macs), Premier favours Nvidia graphics. You should give FCPX a whirl. Chances are it’ll handle better than Premier on your machine.
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I really like the newer Premiere. But I balk at being held hostage for the rest of my life to Adobe for a monthly payment. At least Resolve and FCP X, for now, are single payment, you pay, you own. For a production house, the monthly cost for multiple seats is just part of doing business, but for individuals, it just seems like a ripoff, especially if you are like most smart editors and stay a version or two behind the latest to let all of the new adopters be the Guinea Pigs with new versions and new features. Disappointingly, AVID has gone to this model too for ProTools and for Media Composer. Most full time professional editors we work with always stay a version or two behind on an OS and on the version of the editing software, it's not worth it to have the latest and greatest features when they are often bug riddled and can really screw you over with client deadlines when problems arise.
 
I use FCPX by default when clients don't specify what they want projects edited on. I find it works very well with my C300 MK II footage on my MacBook Pro.
 
Thanks for all the feedback guys, really good to hear this. I think I'll begin making the jump over to FCPx. I've been working through some tutorials, it seems if you can get your mind into the logic of FCPX it can be quite a more efficient than Premiere Pro. The meta data and tagging emphasis seems especially useful for longer form projects.
 
seanarmada said:
Thanks for all the feedback guys, really good to hear this. I think I'll begin making the jump over to FCPx. I've been working through some tutorials, it seems if you can get your mind into the logic of FCPX it can be quite a more efficient than Premiere Pro. The meta data and tagging emphasis seems especially useful for longer form projects.
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10.4 is leagues better than the early versions of FCP X. There are still some things that are maddening but you can work around. It is fast and efficient and the amount of cool plug-ins available for FCP X is astounding. Not the perfect editing solution but the perfect editing solution doesn't exist, they are all riddled with bad design, illogically missing ways to do common tasks that you do repeatedly in the course of editing a project and sometimes can just be a PITA to work with. But at least with FCP X, you won't make monthly payments to Apple to use it for the rest of your life. Adobe/AVID = good tools but the subscription model is a scam. FCP X/Resolve = good tools and you pay once.
 
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I think the comment about getting your mind around FCPX is extremely valid. I have been working with FCP7/FCPX on my 2013 iMac which I loaded with ram, upgraded to an ssd and tossed the super drive and installed another ssd. I also installed Resolve, but it choked often and was not useable. My good friend in another city made the transition from FCP7 to Premiere on his loaded 4.1 MacPro and has had nothing but issues dealing with the constant updates that seem to cause problems. Not a good reference and he is not even cutting 4k. All of this to say that I was looking at PP because of the FCP7 style gui and despite buying and following several online courses for FCPX it has required diligence to get up to reasonable speed with it. All of this auditioning was because over Christmas I built my fourth desktop hackintosh and had to decide what to run. I have gone with FCPX and I am now working with Resolve (which is amazing!)and may eventually buy it . I built the hackintosh btw with Invidia cards knowing that if I could not get my head around FCPX I could go to PP in a windows platform, which my former camera assistant and many others say works very well. So I think the conclusions that PP does not play well with Mac are correct and whether that is "on purpose" by either Adobe or Apple I dunno but not worth the chance in my case. I certainly like the BM Resolve interface and wish they would do a stripped down version that would run on less powerful laptops for those of us who need to do rough cuts in the field and don't want to spend $5k on a laptop. Lets face it I am not going to be doing a grade in the field or a 24 track audio mix.
 
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