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Prem vs FCPX – Panels
Since this is a debate forum and it’s a Friday, what are your thoughts about Adobe’s Premiere Pro panels architecture? This seems to be a key enabler for many third party developers building add-ins to the Premiere UI for direct interaction. It helps push the growth of Premiere Pro penetration into production companies and facilities. Nothing like that exists in FCPX and the presumption is that Apple is not interested in others altering their UI design. It seems like this could offer some real advantages for FCPX. Thoughts?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
243 Replies
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Used the new Vimeo panel for PPro just this morning to send approvals. Very easy and just kept working on the next spot while that all went down.
So I’m for them.
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[Oliver Peters] “Adobe’s Premiere Pro panels architecture?…It helps push the growth of Premiere Pro penetration into production companies and facilities. Nothing like that exists in FCPX and the presumption is that Apple is not interested in others altering their UI design….”
This is an interesting point. You can obviously have fairly elaborate plugins for FCPX such as Color Finale Pro, but it can’t be fully integrated into the UI. In FCPX you also see widely-varying techniques to shoehorn plugin UIs into the canvass. Some like Color Finale have a large floating window. Others like CoreMelt take over part of the Viewer. Neat Video launches an entire sub-interface with tabs and menus. There are other inconsistencies such as multicam doesn’t work with Drop Zones. There is no standard way to check plugin version numbers.
Besides UI issues, the plugin software architecture on FCPX can cause odd behavior. A fundamental principle of UI design is background tasks or computation should not interfere with the main UI thread. A familiar past example was on 16-bit Windows, OS/2 and (I think) macOS before X, the UI input queue was synchronous — if an app hung, it owned the input queue and you lost control of the mouse and keyboard.
With Windows 95, NT, OS/2 Warp 2.x and OS X, they adopted an asynchronous input queue so a hung or CPU-intensive app would not lock out user input: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130604-00/?p=4173
However it appears the plugin threading model used by FCPX has elements similar to a synchronous input queue. A CPU-intensive plugin such as Neat Video can lock out the input for significant periods. Normally — on most plugins and situations — this isn’t a problem but with some it is. I don’t know why Apple designed it this way but there are definitely possible improvements. I don’t recollect seeing this behavior on Premiere but I no longer use it that much. Maybe someone could comment.
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Premiere Pro does have a nice GUI.
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[andy patterson] “Premiere Pro does have a nice GUI.”
Counterpoint: Premiere Pro has a lousy GUI. Crowded, fiddly, ugly, not at all pleasant to use on a daily basis.
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Counter-counterpoint: that’s why Premiere Pro has an interface you can actually change if you don’t like what’s there. Highly customizable.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Joseph W. Bourke] ” Premiere Pro has an interface you can actually change if you don’t like what’s there. Highly customizable.”
Yep, you can make it look like FCPX if you want (Especially now that FCPX looks even more like PPro ☺ )
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So are we talking about the UI look of the panels (which is mostly up to the dev) vs the more GUI restrictions in X, or additional functionality that can be created in PPro via the panels that is beyond what’s capable in X? Or both?
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Well… I… was talking about custom 3rd party panels like those from Vimeo, Wipster, Frame IO, PDF Viewer, Colorista, etc.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeff Markgraf] “[andy patterson] “Premiere Pro does have a nice GUI.”
Counterpoint: Premiere Pro has a lousy GUI. Crowded, fiddly, ugly, not at all pleasant to use on a daily basis.”
Are you serious or just trolling? Feel free to layout your GUI the way you like in your NLE of choice and I will see if I can mimic it in Premiere Pro. I will then customize a few layouts in Premiere Pro and we will see if your NLE can mimic what I have done.
Don’t back out on me, dude. Post some screen shots of your awesome GUI that makes Premiere Pro’s GUI look lousy.
I don’t see Avid or Premiere Pro users saying FCPX has a lousy GUI or that FCPX has an old and obsolete database or FCPX is slow and sluggish but I do see FCPX user saying those things about all the other NLE. Why do you folks think that is?
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I have been using Pr for a job that requires it.
I’m not being pendantic. I don’t know why any editor that works on a deadline would use this software. It is hard to predict and thrives on chaos.
It crashes. A lot. It definitely is fiddly, editing multitrack audio is cumbersome, it has trouble with huge layered PSD files (???). It is so confusing as the same commands are in different places in contextual menus. XML is funky, relinking is not fun, it’s really no fun at all.
I’m glad they aped FCPX’s keyboard shortcut command center, until you need a submenu. I’m glad there’s more ProRes options, I’m glad there’s a 1/4 res playback option.
I’m also glad I don’t have to use it everyday.
So, Panels makes all this more for the better? For who?
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