Newbie - FCP vs Premier CS5 for DSLR, poss RED

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paddlr

New member
Newbie to both the forum and motion work (sort of - I haven't worked in digital motion).
I'm a pro still photographer. Use Canon DSLR's. May jump back to Nikons. With the way clients are loving the RED, I can see it might be in my near future too. I also have nothing at all against dedicated video and film cameras. But right now, I'll be taking advantage of the DSLR's.
I'm preparing to put together short (2-5 min max) reels to both learn the fundamentals of shooting with DSLR's and to create promotional pieces for my business. I'll be filming people on location - outside and indoors (not really studio though).
Being a photographer, I really don't know much about the technical side editing digital video, but I do have a grasp of the creative side of it (as I said, I have shot and edited film and video in the past). I'm very much into having control of and adjusting colour / tone / contrast and in changing frame rates etc. I'm not going to be doing my own special effects, but I will want to play with and manipulate the footage I've shot.
I'm a Mac user and am very familiar with Photoshop, but that doesn't mean I'm particularly wedded to Adobe products. I'm not a fan of overly complicated software though - an intuitive interfaces is pretty important (typical Mac user).

Given the above, I hoping for some guidance on whether I should be looking at FCP or Premier CS5 as my learning tool to get into digital motion. Comparing these two pieces of software is a lot to ask, but if you could point me to the overarching differences between the two or the major points I should consider, that would be great. What other pieces of software would I need to add on to either? Budget is always a consideration. Of course any links / articles / books etc that could help also much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Well they are both great programs and both very easy to learn. Definitely a learning curve to really know the programs bt they both have their benefits. I personally use Final Cut because it's easy (basically drag and drop), I love the pro res codec (great codec to convert the dslr footage to and edit with) and I do a lot of color grading so the Color program is great.

Haven't worked with Premiere in ages but I've heard great things about it. And you don't need to convert any of the dslr footage to edit it. But you can download a 30 day trial and try it out. That's what I would do. I know I've done that with After Effects on whole projects. There aren't any trials for final cut but you can go to any apple store and they'll let you mess with it for as long as you want. First time I used Final Cut I went to the apple store and stood at Mac Pro for 3 hours cutting a commercial for a contest.

So either way you'll be happy, but test them out and compare.
 
Agreed, you will find that most editors all edit the same basic way, where the differences lay are more in the subtle detail, FCP has a large installed user base, is pretty stable, handles large numbers of clips well as well as multiple concurrent projects, but wont play any of the formats natively, requires you to first transcode your footage be it RED, DSLR etc to Prorez (a pretty good CODEC) before you can edit. Premiere is a bit more on the bleeding edge, it supports all formats natively, ie you can drop footage from a Canon, Nikon or even a RED in the timeline and just press play, even with 4K RED files. Premiere has had some stability issues in the past, especially with projects with massive numbers of files, but CS5 is a pretty strong release, it has more realtime than FCP (which is pretty weak in this area) as well as the ability to import and export Final Cut Pro projects. And unlike FCP will work on both PC and Mac. Long story short, bot programs are used by MANY people using DSLR's, both generally actually 'cut' the same, so either will fulfill your needs, its just the little differences that you will have to decide on (although interestingly, the two strongest proponents of DSLR video, Phillip Bloom and Shane Hurlbut are both now in the Premiere CS5 camp) Now I am an Adobe Ambassador so I am quite a fan of Premiere but I cut in Final Cut Pro at my day job so I use both and I can honestly say, you cant make a wrong decision :)
 
I might be going Adobe too. I'm a teacher so I can get it for much cheaper than FCP but the thing is I'm going to be probably working on a G5. So I have to find a hack to make it work on a G5 (or just get CS4, I mean I still use Photoshop 7 for crying out loud). But I may also simply go with FCP 6.

-Nate
 
It will depend on your hardware. As said, both are very solid programs and you can't really go wrong.

Technically - if your Mac has an Nvidia card, you'd be better off with Premiere CS5 as you can take advantage of the Mercury Playback engine, which will mean it can handle raw footage from your cameras much easier. Once compatible plugins begin to come out, it will also make your rendering time significantly shorter. As it is, basic colour correction and keying will be accelerated - which may be worth it for you. The downside is that Macs ship with typically poor graphics cards so the performance boost won't be that substantial.

One advantage to Premiere is it's format support, as you can take pretty much any format and put it on any timeline. It also has integration into After Effects, though this would probably be a non-issue for you. It's still a huge benefit over FCP which only intergrates with Motion (which doesn't really compare).

Other than that it's just preference - the interfaces are almost identical as are the way they work. I barely use FCP but when needed I can easily edit with it, even though I am a Premiere Pro user.
 
It's sounding like people are leaning towards Premiere if for no other reason than it edits natively - which sounds like a pretty huge plus.
I'm waiting for the new MacPro's to come out and I'll definitely get a video card upgrade in my purchase.

Does anyone have a sense of how colour manipulation compares between FCP and Premiere? For ease of use, for range (how far you can go) and for fine controls?

Regards price, I hate dealing with Adobe. Nathyn, I also have some access to educational pricing. FCP Studio I can get for $400 (educational). Can't upgrade it, but it's a clean, simple purchase. Premiere is way more complex. I have CS3 design suite (photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign), but trying to figure out pricing for Premiere or an upgrade including Photoshop is a nightmare. Educational pricing looks like $1400 or something insane.

If I was to go with Premiere (separately from any CS5 Bundles), what else would I need to get to have an equivalent to FCP Studio?

Thanks for the help!
 
After Effects (Motion), Soundbooth (Soundtrack Pro) and Encore (DVD Studio) would be FCP Studio equivalents. Though, if you're doing any semi-serious effects work, you'd want After Effects anyway. Colour correction is done inside Premiere so there's no equivalent to Colour. You can switch the workspace easily to do colour correction, though.
 
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