Any REAL alternatives to FCP for Windows?

[John Pale]

I hear there’s this good up and coming product called Avid that does well for PC people…

[Steve Eisen]

You sound like those Best Buy Commercials. You have 2 options.

1. Buy a PC and regret it for the rest of your life.

2. Spend the extra money on a MAC (get the most you can afford) and realize that you made the best decision of your life. Think of it as an investment. Your goal is to make money from your computer.

It is your money spend it how you would like.

These are the answers you will get on a FCP (MAC ONLY) forum.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Chris Fisher]

And that’s kinda what I have been thinking of doing.. Just really, a MacPro would be ideal that the cost is so high (for me)…

But I figured I’d get head from the Mac/Final cut group.. But also figured you might all know my best alternative…

I’ll take a look at Avid. I think I am hoping you guys will convince me to stay with Final Cut.. lol!
-Chris

[Michael Sacci]

Vegas people love Vegas, they are more rabid fans then us FCP users. but if you already have FCP and are upgrading a system you already for the software that you would have to buy on the PC.

ProRes of course is Mac only as far as encoding.

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Chris,
I work with Mac and I live 500 miles away from the nearest Apple service.
Try to do that with a PC.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Alan Lacey]

I’ve been a PC editor ever since DOS and have used FCP alongside for about the last six years trying to do what you’re considering but in reverse.

I tried the change because Pinnacle (followed by Avid) bought out FAST in Germany and underdeveloped what was a great system.

On the whole I’ve been dissapointed with the Macs and the FC suite and will probably not follow thru now any further with ?Snow Leopard ?FCS3. I’m currently running FCS on MBP with IoHD for SD and 1080i50Prores.

Having had rock solid systems based on WinNT though, I think your problem at present will be choosing the OS rather than the apps. I’m currently running Edius and Vegas on a mobile Vista64 workstation that makes my 2.4GHz MBP look like a carthourse and it’s pretty stable, but there’s a lot of critism of Vista. Windows7, now in Beta is considered much better but not official yet.

Vegas has a quirky frontend and would take some getting used to, Edius and PremPro are much more like FCP. Edius has much realtime and never crashes but only has hardware support (cheap and good mind you) for desktop systems. I’d love to have something similar to the IoHD running alongside.

Depending on the work you do you’ll need AE as a substitute for Motion and your Compressor alternative for Edius is ProCoder3, it has a good reputation and it does all that I need.

I think the Avid Guy’s would suggest Avid which would make you platform independant, although I’ve little experience of those systems.

Alan

XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas
G5,MBP,XP

[Chris Fisher]

Alan,

Thanks a ton for the fantastic answer, and the tip about Motion/AE.

-Chris

[Geoff Addis]

I have both FCP and Edius on the same MacPro. Edius knocks the socks off FCP as far as real time previewing without the need to render is concerned and when rendering is needed it is far faster than FCP. The steadycam feature included with Edius 5 is far better than that with FCP and only analyses and converts that part of the clip that is used on the timeline; the inclusion of a curves feature to adjust the picture is great in comparrison to that provided by the colour correction features of FCP. However, Edius does not have the more extensive sound editing features that are included in the FCS suite n’or Motion and lacks some in the alpha channel capability of FCP, but it does have a title program and DVD/Bluray writing direct from the time line. Edius does not rely on proprietry hardware for its performance, but some of the added 3rd party software does benefit from having a good graphics card; if you include the Grass Valley Firecoder Blu hardware then you will be able to render H264 for Bluray faster than real time. Edius 5 also includes transcoding feature that were formerly available only in Procoder 3. The program is stable and rock solid.

Why don’t you download a 30 day trial copy from the Edius site?

Overall I’m very dissapointed with the performance of FCP and cannot understand why anything PC is so quickly dismissed by many in the Mac fraternity.

[Alan Lacey]

Very valid Geoff. Particularly the Edius audio comments. I know of a lot of people that edit vid in Edius and do their audio work in Vegas. Vegas I understand started life as an audio app. They both coexist happily on my Vista64 machine.

Interesting that it works so well on the MacPro! Although having said that I guess I’m not really surprised, It’s rock solid stable on the PC and I understand isn’t at fussy about hardware.

Edius still needs to mature a little though. eg there’s a bug that stops it loading more than about 30 entries in any imported ale files. This is a real pain for a lot of my work.

The best included titling app in Edius is Title Motion Pro (Insriber) which I grew up with and like, but to say it’s counterintuitive is the understatement of the decade!

I guess Edius on a modern i7 with the interface hardware for HD SDI although very cheap would absolutely fly.

We’re OT here though, this is an FCP forum!!

Alan

XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas
G5,MBP,XP

[Walter Biscardi]

If ProRes is a large part of your workflow, then FCP is what you want. If you’re a working professional you should be able to afford one Mac Pro to do the work on.

For Windows look at Premiere, Vegas and Avid. All work, all cost varying amounts of money, none will work natively with ProRes files.

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

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