Premiere Pro VS Final Cut Pro - Help Please

L

larrys

Well-known member
I learned that it is possible to edit native AVCHD files in Premiere. I currently edit in Final Cut Pro. Can anyone tell me other advantages to Premiere and if editing native AVCHD would be enough of a reason to switch programs? Also, coming from FCP, is there a major learning curve with Premiere - is it vastly different?

Thanks for any feedback.
 
you can go to adobe's site, download the free trial and see for yourself.
I'm an avid user of Adobe Premiere and although editing native MTS files is great, final cut pro does an excellent log and capture.
There are very similiar in their NLE interface and you should be comfort with both.
The downside to adobbe is the reliability. I cant count how many times its crashed on me, loosing almost an hour or two worth of work.
Just remember to save a lot.
 
What I have grown to absolutely LOVE bout Adobe is how integrated EVERYTHING they have is. I had a project and misspelled one word in one of the base layers of my Photoshop Title template project. Because I had imported the Photoshop project into Premiere and not a JPEG or other file format, all I had to do was make the correction in Photoshop, save it, and it was corrected globally. I went from every title in every clip needing to be rebuilt and replaced, to "all done" in a matter of minutes.
 
to do the basics in ADOBE PREMIERE its a piece of cake, would probably take about a day to adapt to a switch over from FCP, as MikeShea said, go to the ADOBE site and download a free trial, its a full working version for 1 month, i think you would pick it up pretty quick.

i like ADOBE... once you get to know one program all the other seem to make sense too! and all the programs together and you can create nearly anything you can dream of... as long as its not 3D :smile:

ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS is my "crash" program, i've set up a nice autosave in prefs :smile:
 
Just to elaborate on my screw up and fix, and not sure if this is available to other NLEs with Photoshop or not.

My Project Title Template began with the corporate logo as the first layer. The second layer was the project name, this is where my mistake was made. These two layers were saved as my template, and from here I used this template and created the 40 name titles, 12 subject titles and 5 location titles. All 57 of these titles would have to have been trashed and replaced, had I not been able to just save "globally" with Photoshop.
 
Well - I got premiere pro a few weeks ago. I dont think it is intuitive at all - I had to buy the 'classroom in a book' which is 398 pages long with lots of practical exercises to do. Contrast this to power director that I just installed and learnt in a day by mucking around with it.

Now that I have got the basics I realise its potential - and I am already appreciating the work flow between that and after effects (which i am just beginning to learn as well.)

Very powerful suite and in my experience so far it hasn't crashed at all thank goodness.

If you have a relevant NVIDIA card that can use the mercury engine then it is well worth a trial. If you can't do mercury I don't think it would make as much sense.
 
The integration of Premiere Pro with Photoshop and After Effects is an awesome feature. However, one thing you can do with FCP is just open the original Photoshop file, make the changes, save as PNG or whatever format you want, overwrite that PNG file (or whatever you used) you put into your FCP project, and then the FCP project will be updated. You can do the same thing with your After Effects outputs. It's a little extra work, but it still works. You can also use Motion to do your titles and animations and some visual fx stuff (not as good as After Effects though), place the Motion file directly in FCP, and changes you make to the Motion project will take affect right away in FCP. With FCP you get Color, which in my personal opinion, is infinitely superior to color correction in Premiere Pro or After Effects. It's difficult to send a project from Premiere Pro to Color if you're using both suites, but it is possible. You do have Magic Bullet Looks available on both suites, but Color is more powerful, although not as simple.

Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) has stated that a new version of Final Cut Studio is coming early next year (which could mean mid-year). There's a lot of speculation over what the changes will be. We may see 64-bit apps, native editing, new app additions to the suite, better integration between the apps, who knows. Unless you really really need to switch to Premiere Pro right now for some reason I'd wait to see what the new Final Cut Studio brings us. A major update of the suite (Final Cut Studio 3 was very very minor) is long overdue so hopefully we'll see a lot of new things with it.
 
No mention of the mercury playback engine? This IMO is the biggest factor between the two and the one that really sets PPCS5 apart from FCP. I have always loved using adobe software but being able to offload the CPU to the GPU is amazing in my eyes and well worth it.
 
if you use a workflow completely within adobe (as i.e. described in The Rebel Guide by Stu Maschwitz) it´s truer than ever in CS5 that everything goes hand in hand, with sense and fast. Cut your footage in Premiere, go to After Effects for everything else, maybe get Colorista... I have an 4Core 8Threads machine and AVCHD performs very nicely in Premiere. For normal cutting I didn´t have to render any preview so far.
 
Thanks to everyone for the feedback. There's a lot to consider here and I appreciate the good information.
 
Hi,
So far, the Premiere is in some way above the FCP thanks to the formats it supports natively (AVCHD for example) and the Mercury playback engine.
To be honest, current version (CS5) is the first one I´m not having stability problems with :D And I´ve haven´t seen smoother previews with that many effects in any other NLE (ofcourse, it depends on many things - Magic bullet for example isn´t accelerated too much).
Not a crash yet. But since I know Premiere, it´s more a question of when than if :D

You can use a hack to switch to hardware rendering mode (via CUDA) of the Mercury engine but ONLY IF you have an Nvidia card and at least cca 800MB of RAM on it (so basically 1GB version). This made me a bit angry since I´ve bougth a card a month before the CS5 and you´ve guessed it, it´s 512 :D Also the Quadro cards we have at work cannot use the hardware acceleration because of the RAM size. Pity.

I would strongly not recommend the CS4, and when used on Vista, it´s useless.
CS3 on an Win XP 32 is one of the most reliable solutions I had, but funny thing was, only on Core 2 duo machines. The double Quad core Xeon worstation was painfully unstable (mind you we´re talking hadling 60-100 GB of material in a project)
CS5 on a 64bit Win 7 (you MUST have the 64 bit system for run the Premiere and After effects) is absolutely fantastic! I´ve even convinced a friend to switch from FCP to Premiere
Conclusion: In no way I´m saying that Premiere is better than Final cut pro. They both have advantages. For me it´s the speed and reliability that counts. You get that with CS5.

Cheers ;)
D.K.
 
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