Why do you prefer Premier over FCP or Avid?

U

Unicorn Power

Member
I'm interested in learning editing, but I'm still on the fence as to which program to learn. Most people I know use FCP, but they're not professional editors. Most people say that professional editors use Avid.

So where does that leave Premier?

I really like the idea of an integrated editing suite such as Adobe CS. It makes a lot of sense to me to stick with one platform. However, I only know one person who uses Premier and that is keeping me from considering it.

I mean, how common is it really and is it really worth the investment in time and cash?

What kind of people are typically using Premier and for what kind of projects? How similar is it to FCP or Avid?


FYI, I'm not interested in becoming a professional editor, but I do want to be a good editor. I'm more interested in becoming a DIT.
 
Being a good editor lies with the person, not the NLE.

If you're not looking to sell your services as an editor, then use whatever you think works best for you. Don't worry about what anyone else uses.
 
David Jimerson said:
Being a good editor lies with the person, not the NLE.

If you're not looking to sell your services as an editor, then use whatever you think works best for you. Don't worry about what anyone else uses.
Click to expand...

Although I am not looking to sell my services specifically as an editor, I do think that they will be useful, if not necessary, in the role of a DIT. Not to mention, just helping around set and speaking a language / system everyone can understand.

I'm only worried about what everyone else has in so far as it will affect my workflow and ability to market myself.

I should probably just learn both!
 
I have all three NLEs (FCP, PPro and Avid). I'm specifically an editor because it's the one position I feel confident in as well the position lots of people want me to instruct them in. Like Dave says, you are not defined by the tools you use as filmmaker in this industry. It's your ability to tell great and compelling stories. But I get what you are saying and clients really don't care what you edit on but if you want to work at a production company or something like that it wouldn't hurt to know them all. I'm still learning new ways to be efficient and better in all 3 NLEs. In certain areas some programs hold more hold than others. Where I teach, FCP is favored as the broadcast standard overall but Avid still has a good foot in the ground. Premiere is starting to gain steam with the release of FCP X and being that it integrates well with other industry standard apps like Photoshop and After Effects. Also, the position you want to is more of an on set position than post production but I get what you are saying
 
I prefer FCP & Premiere. I freelance and I use FCP with some of my clients when I'm working at their studios, but use Premiere when editing at home. I can't afford to run FCP on my personal workstations at home. Equivelant hardware is triple the price, which makes it completely unfeasable for me at this stage.

I don't have any problems going between them, though. Editing is editing. Some things require a different approach and some lateral thinking, but I've never had anything I couldn't achieve in one system that I could've done in the other. Try them all out, see which one suits you best, and make your decision based on that. I know plenty of professionals using FCP, and plenty using Premiere (Avid is not big at all in my area though). They will all let you achieve pretty much whatever you want (including 95% of your coloring, titling and FX), espescially as you are not aiming to be a full time editor so proabably won't be demanding as much from the software as others might.
 
I'm a long time FCP user, but I'm making the switch to Premiere slowly due to the whole FCS->FCX debacle not too far removed.

There are a lot of things that I like about FCP that I'll miss with Pr (at least things I can't figure out yet). I like how footage playback smoothly in FCP, wherein Pr lags a lot more. I like how if I drag footage into an empty sequence, FCP will correct the sequence settings if they're off. I also like the snapping feature more in FCP (CTI snaps).

But I like how Adobe hasn't given their customers the shaft unlike Apple, which is why the migration has started.

It's a learning curve either way. I personally am a much bigger fan of FCP just for how smooth everything runs in comparison to Pr, but it's one of those things I'll have to get over.
 
I´m an Adobe beta tester, so I might be a bit biased.
But I worked on Avid and FCP so I know at least what I´m talking about.

What I really like on Premiere, is the fact that you just can trow anything at the timeline, without converting it to some special format the NLE understands.
From AVCHD to RED RAW - it just eats everything. If you have a Cuda (nvida) card, you can almost kiss rendering goodbye.
Final output to your delivery format is also in higher quality and speed with Cuda.

Also the seamless integration of Photoshop, Illustrator, Encore and After Effects.

Depending on your file format, you may need a strong computer to get everything smooth and realtime.
AVCHD for example is extremely demanding on the hardware - P2 is sheer smooth fun, even on a 5 year old machine.
Uncompressed is extremely snappy if your discs can handle the data rate. Also Cineform works just fine and smooth.

my ct2, Frank
 
I definitely agree with Postmaster on not having to transcode footage all the time. That it's a real PITA in FCP.
 
Gentlemen,

Thanks for your advice. I've made up my mind... I'm learning all three!

I'm going to start with FCPX and then move on to PP, after which, I'll see about Avid.

Bear in mind, I plan on becoming a DIT. So I need to be competent and proficient on NLEs, but by no means an expert... who knows where this will lead?

I'm going to learn Davinci Resolve too.
 
Avid is old and archaic. The reason large companies still use it is due to contractual obligations as well as the fact that their companies have already invested hundreds of thousands or millions. As a result, all their previous projects are in Avid.

FCP is also old and archaic. The reason why so many people use(d) it is that (1) it was affordable, (2) it was easily accessible, (3) it was much more stable than previous versions of Premiere. Essentially, unless you had tens of thousands of dollars to invest in an avid system, FCP was the only option.

Premiere used to be crap. Starting with CS5 is has proven to be a modern, stable, and fast 64-bit platform, which also integrates well with other key apps such as Photoshop and AE.

The current state of affairs:

Avid - will be dead within 5 years. Company has already laid off hundreds of employees. Large production houses are waiting for their licenses/contracts to expire and are moving to Premiere for a fraction of the cost....They'll probably keep their Avid systems for backwards compatibility until their projects are ported to a more modern platform.

FCP - Dead. No more support, no more patches, abandoned by Apple in favor of FCPX, which is unsuitable for professional editing in its current state.

Premiere CS5/5.5 - Maximum media compatibility, no transcoding, stable, cheap, fast, modern, 64-bit. Probably the next major NLE as soon as the prejudices associated with previous versions are forgotten.

If you want to be a pro editor, learn all 3...As far as which order you should learn them in...I'd say FCP-->Premiere-->Avid.

Premiere has optional keyboard layouts/shortcuts identical to FCP, so if you learn FCP first you can transition to Premiere easily.
 
Phil1076 - you might want to preface your post with "in my opinion". There's a lot of misinformation in your post. Avid did lay people off but with the release of FCPX it's poised to regain a ton of lost ground, and is already moving in that direction. Premiere is not a replacement to Avid for shared project workflows, and regarding large production houses dumping Avid - hardly. Read the article below:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/1136...ofessional-editing-and-storage-solutions.html

To the OP - if you want to be a professional editor on features and higher end broadcast, learn Avid. If you want to do corporate work, weddings, web stuff, etc... (non-feature/TV/higher end broadcast) learn Premiere. Premiere will probably make some inroads into episodic TV and feature work but I don't expect it to happen any time soon. I wouldn't spend 5 minutes learning FCP anymore unless you mean FCPX. And i wouldn't bother with it until the next update to see just how devoted Apple is to improving their product. No sense in wasting time on an EOL product or a product who's future is a little uncertain.

Premiere 5.5 has a lot of promise but needs a lot of tweaking and finessing still. CS6 will be the real tell on how seriously Adobe wants to compete in the higher end, and I think they really, really do. I expect CS6 to be as big, if not bigger, of an improvement than 5 was over CS4. The no-transcoding stuff is nice, but it's not rock solid, and for every day editing it's just not as fast or transparent as Avid. But I think it will get there - it just isn't yet in a lot of ways.

That said, if you want to be a DIT learn all three, but probably spend the least time on FCP. It's EOL and people will be using it less and less, and if you just started in this business by the time you're on sets doing DIT work it may well be gone for good. But you will need to understand each NLE's workflows for lots of different cameras. So download the trial of Avid, download the trial of Adobe, test them out until the trial expires and go with the one you're most comfortable with at the moment. Get good at it and start earning money with it then buy the other system and get good with it too. If you learn Avid first, Premiere will be a breeze. If you learn Premiere first, Avid will give you growing pains but you'll be fine.

Good luck and have fun. It's an interesting time in post right now.
 
If you're going to learn all three, start with Avid. It forces you to think more efficiently, and that's a skill useful to editors on any NLE.
 
Well, Zak Forsman was the first to put it that way, but it's certainly true. Be sure you're not just learning programs, but learning how to edit.
 
Go Avid >> Premiere. FCP is basically worthless now. Only holdouts who love FCP 7 despite it being a generation obsolete still use it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's a dying system.
 
I've gotta get off FCP. But dammit, I'm still on 6 and love it!

Hawk raised some good points. I love the way FCP adjusts the sequence when you drag a clip.

But I can't stand transcoding and most everything I do is DSLR footage now. I have a day's worth of interview footage that will need to be attended to.

The one sticking point for me is compressor. It's just part of my workflow and I love it. If I can figure out the Adobe alternative, and if it's good, I will continue my migration. I've tried working with Media Encoder and was less than wowed. Is it any good?
 
What weren't you wowed with? The interface is a little weird but once you get your presets in line you can set stuff up really fast, and the encoding is much faster than Compressor.

We're switching to Premiere from FCP and once I got my setting dialed in right I ran a test. Compressing a :30 spot in Compressor for ExtremeReach delivery with QMaster off took about 12 minutes. With QMaster on it took less (can't remember how much less) but QMaster is hit and miss on our systems. n Media Encoder, same compression, it took about 3 minutes if I remember right. Maybe less, but I remember the time difference was staggering. Bets of all - the file it spit out passed ExtremeReach QC first time through. I haven't used Compressor since except for a few jobs here and there that I haven't set presets up for in Media Encoder.

It's crazy fast.
 
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