After Effects vs. Final Cut

[Todd Tennant]

Well, looks like this won’t work out for me.

While attempting to install AE, I got a “System Check” window telling me
“This product does not support PowerPC Architecture CPU”, so now I have
to send the software back & get a refund.

Please know that I nonetheless still appreciate your help from all who participated in this thread, but know also that this is the first time I’ve ran up against this condition for any software. So please…..do not “scold” me for not knowing this, ok (I got enough of that on the MacWorld forum)? I am only posting this as a heads-up to any other PowerPC CPU users out there considering an AE purchase.

T

[Walter Biscardi]

[Todd Tennant] “While attempting to install AE, I got a “System Check” window telling me
“This product does not support PowerPC Architecture CPU”, so now I have
to send the software back & get a refund. “

Good luck on that. Took me almost 8 months to get my refund. My VAR didn’t even know that Premiere and Encore were not supported on the PowerPC G5.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Todd Tennant]

8 MONTHS??!! So sorry to hear that, man.
I’ll drive over there to Kennesaw before letting this go that long!

Believe me, I can relate.
No one told me or my dealer that G5s were going to be replaced
by the Intel-chipped Mac Pros a month after I purchased my Quad-core either.

T

[Mark Onat]

I demoed After Effects a few times, and decided I liked it quite a bit. i figured I’d buy the Production premium instead of FCP because it included Premiere.

Well, it’s turned out that Premiere CS4 is both lousy for capture, and has a stunted list of transitions and effects, and doesnt export HD QT. Now I find myself back in iMovie, wondering whether to get Final Cut Express or FCP (which has batch export, something great if you want to grind out a bunch of edited clips). Encore has also been a bear, and I dont trust it to burn anything.

So, if you have to choose one or the other, and you’re doing lost of video editing, go with Final Cut Studio. I suppose if you’re doing pro level compositing, then AE is the way to go and it is an efficient elegant program, unlike Premiere, Encore, and Bridge, but I think you can still do 5-10 layer keying and compositing in FCP and do fine, and it comes with plenty of the cool text effects in AE.

of course, if you’re a pro you will own both, or that Nuke software which supposedly is supplanting AE. My point is don’t think that Premiere is a substitute for FCP, because it is not even close (on the mac).

[Dennis Radeke]

I am curious at how Premiere Pro is lousy at capture? Any standard firewire codec (DV, HDV) comes across no problem and of course tape based HD material needs a hardware I/O card, but file based HD codecs are almost all natively supported and DOES NOT require a ‘capture’ process at all. The list includes P2, AVCHD, XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD and of course RED files. As for a list of transitions, I tend to agree that it has a short list for two reasons. First, most editors are doing cuts and too many people never use some of these transitions anyway, so why make some of them? Second, Adobe’s great strength is a wide array of 3rd party plugin partners that can provide specific features that you may require.

As for outputting Quicktime HD – you do that through the Adobe Media Encoder. File>Export>Media will launch it. Choose quicktime and access any codec that Quicktime supports. It does background processing and batch processing so you can continue edit while you’re outputting.

Encore has its proponents and its detractors so I’ll let you figure that one out, but I will point out it that is a cost effective solution to output blu-ray on a Mac.

As for comparing to FCP, comparing any two NLE’s is an exercise in opinion as I tend to think that all NLE’s have something good to talk about. The things that are good about Premiere Pro include better integration with After Effects, Photoshop and the rest of the suite, superior tapeless support, metadata and mixing media.

My .25 cents. 😉

[Lance Fallon]

As they’ve said Final Cut & AE are completely different programs. But if you need to do both & you’re looking to save a few bucks, you could always buy Sony Vegas Pro & AE. Then use ’em together (vegas for editing & AE for compositing).