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An anal-retentive FCP switcher’s notes on Premiere Pro
I just wrote a big, long, nitpicking review of the Premiere Pro interface, from my perspective as a control freak and recent switcher from FCP:
https://www.exgfilms.com/?p=1477
Anyone care to weigh in? Is there anything I’m just completely wrong about?
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Andrew Gingerich
Filmmaker -
15 Replies
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From someone who’s been editing on PP since CS2, here’s some thoughts on your thoughts. I’ll be typing these in as I read your article:
You can make any window fullscreen by hitting the ` key. Not quite the same as full screen play back, but if you expand the program window to full screen it’s close.
Mackie control is only missing from this version of Audition. It’s coming back in CS6. (confirmed by the lead developer.) Maybe PP will get it as well. Don’t judge audition based on CS5.5… it’s going through an FCPX like rewrite. I still use Audition 3 for half of my projects cause of the missing features. (however, unlike FCPX there’s very good communication with the developer… and that poor guy has had quite the ear full over some of the stupidest missing things. No grouping of clips, no MIDI, no Mackie, no Metronome, no CD authoring… I have to say, it’s been interesting watching everyone go through FCPX after having Audition CS5.5 dumped on me a couple months earlier.)
I’m guessing renders seem slow because you’re used to FCP borrowing encoded frames from the source and rendering those sections at the speed of a file copy. PP can’t do that. (Why they don’t add it I don’t know, Seems like an obvious addition. Maybe with all the FCP blood coming in it will be.)
When PP won’t render a video, despite the fact that it won’t play back in real time, you can force it to render any section of your timeline by selecting it with the work area and selecting Sequence>Render entire work area.
Great Article, By the way. I agree with everything, pretty much.
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John, heres a quote from Wil (a tech from Adobe) explaining why PrP doesn’t export in the same manner that FCP did…
What you’re looking for is what we commonly refer to as smart rendering, and it doesn’t exist in PPro. That’s a Final Cut ‘ism, where it splices rendered data from the preview QT files into the final render. Keep in mind that’s a QuickTime centric feature, & doesn’t translate automatically to all file formats.
The ‘Use preview files’ option in PPro is exactly that – if there’s a preview file, it decodes the frame out of it, & re-encodes it into the final file. So while it’ll help in (non-CUDA) effects heavy compositions, it also incurs a generation loss. Generally, we don’t recommend using it (hence the default to off) unless you really are sure that’s what you want.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3 -
Hi Andrew,
You will find some frustrations, as there are things which are more intuitive/easier on FCP7, but then there are a lot of things that are better about PP…
My biggest gripes on PP are both basic editing issues.
1/ track selection – tabbing tracks method and function is clumsy and unnecessarily complex for 99% of functions. One click/keyboard command should be enough to target a track
2/ basic editing commands – I DETEST the way Premiere Pro uses different commands for range-selected clips (by IO point) and clips that are selected by clicking on them using your mouse or marquee selecting a bunch of them. I very strongly believe, for example, Ctrl-X (or whatever you choose) should do the same CUT function no matter which method of selection you use. It becomes muddled and convoluted otherwise… and to very little advantage other than rare specialist occasions where you WANT to have some clips selected by mouse click WHILE you cut some other piece of the timeline (I have not once in 20 years of Non-Linear editing, wanted to do this, but it seems there are some influential people who have persuaded the Adobe engineers otherwise). Then there are the odd missing keyboard commands, mark IO, press delete or backspace, NOTHING HAPPENS!! mark IO, press Ctrl-C to copy, NOTHING HAPPENS!!!.
As much as I dislike Apple as a company, what they get more right more often than anyone else is the user experience, making things feel easy and natural to use. It amazes me when people with enormous brain power like the guys that work on Adobe products, come up with brain dead zones like these and offer no justification as to why it remains this way.
Otherwise, I FAR prefer the versatility of using Premiere, especially now I have upgraded from a Mac, and have not once found a file I cannot use in any timeline with NO transcoding necessary… gotta love that, a lot!
Mark.
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Thanks Tom – I’ve read a few descriptions of these items, and these were the most helpful.
“Constituo, ergo sum”
Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
Quantel-Avid-FCP-3D-AFX-Crayola
Panasonic HPX500/AF100 -
Carful Mark…. You’re expecting PP to act like FCP and blasting Adobe when it doesn’t. I agree with your points, and I expect #2 has a high likelihood of being fixed, but making comments about the skill of the interface designers at the respective companies silly.
I remember FCP driving me nuts over the convoluted method of editing linked audio and video separately.
They both have their faults…
We’ve learned to edit so that the tool works for us.
P.S. I’m told that track tabbing thing was borrowed from AVID, so if you don’t like it, shout at them.
P.P.S Sorry, I have a particular beef with apple about their bad interface design… cough*finder*cough
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Hi John,
Youre right about shouting at the adobe guys, I do think however that they are still influenced by some of the (horribly clunky and outdated) avid paradigms.
As for osx and finder, dont get me started… one of the major advantages of windows IMO is the superior explorer, and the WAY superior dialogue boxes. In (most) windows programmes (not adobe premiere pro!) you get the fully fledged windows dialogue box to open, save, save as, export. This is a dream compared to osx… for these reasons
1/ if you were tooling around deep in your E:/year/client/project/HD clips/from camera/ folder, you can copy the path, and paste it to any of these file open/save/render/etc requesters, and you go whammo directly to the folder, no need to mess about digging and remembering where that thing is…
2/ if you have reason to rename/move/delete/copy/check for file size/sort by file size/etc… the windows requester allows you to do that as if it was a small version of windows explorer. Fantastic functionality! I have NO idea why Premiere Pro instead uses the teenzy, dumbed down little dialogue box which offers nothing other than to make a new folder.
anyhow, there is a LOT to love about PP.
cheers,
Mark. -
PP uses the sad Mac excuse for a file dialog?
I wouldn’t know. I edit on Windows! Fooled you there… You were preaching to the choir!
I own a MPB that’s my personal computer and a Windows 7 edit monster (named Odin) that I built myself. I had the option to go Mac about a year and a half ago, but decided that Windows was a better choice, because there was no longer any reason to edit on Mac other then if I’d used FCS, which I didn’t. Interesting given what happened this year with the EOL of FCP and the potential EOL of the Mac Pro.
Another pro Windows point, I just learned that DiVinci resolve on windows will support 16GPUs! It only supports 3 on Mac. Given the prices of Quadros and the fact that the GTX series is faster anyway and a lot less expensive…. I feel the need for SPEED!!!
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Yes…some of us did choose Premiere Pro back when FCP was still an actual option… We don’t wish the application to become FCP.
That said, the selection/range/work area/in-out working metaphors have been added and changed over time…as have the layer selection/implementation functions. The input track select thing aping Avid at the insistence of Avid users…and I see certain add-on features coming because of similar FCP user’s insistence.
For a software application to be intuitive, it needs to have some core operational metaphors that echo across various functional areas of the interface…that in turn create a set of assumptions about interface and function relationships, making new functions and features less foreign as they still have a consistent visual “language”.
Therefore, I agree that there are simply too many overlapping, sometimes dissonant pipeline metaphors to learn to make the functionality portfolio as whole very intuitive on the timeline…even for long time PPro users. However, my wish would be for Adobe to look at what they have and optimize it instead of add more interface mimic functionality to please users of other systems…as that’s what has resulted in the convolution you noted…not the fact that they haven’t aped Apple or Avid or (your favorite NLE here) enough.
So…as Adobe continues to accommodate those who want Premiere Pro to be something else…keep that in mind.
Premiere Pro continues to take bits of everyone else’s favorite tool and add it on to make pieces seem “familiar” to switchers…but this accumulation of workflow features doesn’t help the software optimize speed or intuitiveness…or streamline overall functional context…it just collects bits of other operational metaphors that are very tough to interpret in aggregate.
In summary…be careful what you wish for…
Please.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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I’d agree on many things…I’ve been reporting the playback interruption when autosave happens for years…and told it can’t be reproduced…
The “graph editor” comment was a bit of an RTM issue I’m afraid…go to the panel menu in the Effect Controls…top right…uncheck “pin to clip” and you’ll be able to zoom out further than the clip length.
In the titler, simply use the vertical/horizontal center widgets in the “title actions” subpanel, where the align and distribute widgets reside…and to view the video frame full size in the title designer composition interface, drag-scale the window larger. I’d hate to trade PPro’s titler for any of the titlers in FCP.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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[Tim Kolb] “The “graph editor” comment was a bit of an RTM issue I’m afraid…go to the panel menu in the Effect Controls…top right…uncheck “pin to clip” and you’ll be able to zoom out further than the clip length.”
Thanks—that was driving me nuts.
Agreed re: the titler. It’s fair game to love FCP or hate it, but nobody can dispute that it has a terrible title designer. Premiere’s isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I’ve seen.
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Andrew Gingerich
Filmmaker
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