-
Does anyone use PPro as a professional?
-
“The term Professional is always used out of context my the so called professionals.”
I agree. This thread has once again opened the Pandora’s box of professionalism in our “industry”, whatever that is. Of course, when you ask a categorical question to such a diverse crowd that is to be expected.
So then, what is a professional? What is a professional Editor? Who edits as part of his job, but doesn’t call himself editor per se, but video producer, or director, or audiovisual designer? Is a DV/HDV self-educated, freelance desktop editor a professional? And who calls him/herself an editor just because he/she has Final Cut Studio installed on his/her MacBook Pro and charges a fee for everything he/she cuts? Sometimes there’s no easy answer. No matter how you look at it, the terms “Editing” and “professional” have become way too broad.
On Television today many commercials, Documentaries, Musical Videos, Church Videos and more are all done with Premiere.
In my case, I work in a small production house where every editing suite runs Premiere Pro 2.0 on Windows, two of them with the entire CS3 suite and Blackmagic capture cards. One of the rooms is frequently used for editing a TV show which is recorded “as-live”. For this kind of lengthy but “light” editing jobs and the shorter projects like VNR’s, TV promos and corporate videos, PPro 2.0 works beautifully. It’s trustworthy around here. On the other hand, PPro CS3 by itself is not good enough for editing, but that’s another story.
From what I’ve been told and seen around, seems like the role Premiere Pro plays in the “professional” arena in the US goes down like this:
BROADCASTING – Not for hire or as an employee, unless it’s an oddball promo department or a very small TV station that works with DV/DVCPRO footage.
FILM/TV EDITORS in major post houses in the San Fernando Valley / Santa Barbara / New York – Come on! Do I have to answer? Do they know Premiere PRO even exists? (No, seriously…)
MEDIUM-TO-SMALL PRODUCTION/POST HOUSES (doing anything EXCEPT episodic TV or full-length films) – YES, but not too commonly used. In many cases, FCP or Avid are the main editing suites and Premiere sits there as an alternative cutting/conversion/preview tool for motion graphics/3D/compositing/VFX artists.
SMALL, INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION/POST HOUSES – Not many, but definitely YES. It’s still a relative minority, but many independents have found Premiere Pro suitable for their needs, especially when properly integrated with the rest of the Adobe suite. That’s my case.
EVENT VIDEOGRAPHERS – Of course! The original Premiere crowd is very much alive and well, except for the few that did convert to Final Cut years ago. But amongst those, many have come back for good reason. They should be happy that Premiere Pro by itself is now
a smaller suite of apps, enough for most people.But frankly, the fact that you won’t find many job postings for “Premiere Pro editors” speaks for itself. And if you actually find one, it would probably be from a Canadian boutique or a very local US TV station. Many employers call the position “editor” but require candidates to have a working knowledge of the other Adobe Suite apps, which makes the ideal candidate a “one-man-band”-type person instead of an editor.
Maybe Premiere is destined to keep the role of a rouge, guerrilla-type tool of choice for risk-taking filmmakers, independent creatives, corporate video editors, event videographers and YouTube enthusiasts. But who knows, that might even change.(outside of L.A. and the Unions, of course)
Neil Bastin
-
Over the long haul I’d say that some releases of Premiere have been better than others, but here have been a few real dogs. I had 6.5 and CS2 running quite well. CS3 wasn’t great for me, and as I remember it was 1.0 or 1.5 that really stank. CS4 I just have running now in a trial version without any hardware or plug ins. Generally I think a lot of people in PC land have had difficulty running premiere stable, and maybe that’s been the biggest complaint. Feature wise I think it’s gotten pretty good, and I’m ok with the interface. I don’t have any experience with Final Cut, but I think Vegas, Avid, Liquid Edition, Edius, all run more stable. Edius is rock solid and has great real time with their Canopus codec, but not the features of Premiere and I don’t like the interface as much. I ran Avid with the Mojo for a while, and it was quite stable, but it wasn’t easy to figure out how to use. Liquid was like Edius in that it didn’t have all the features but it had background rendering that really worked pretty nice, and it was pretty stable, and came with a break out box for viewing the time line on an external monitor. It really was a pretty nice and rather inexpensive setup.
I really hope that CS4 will prove a decent release and will work well in 64 bit Vista. I really hope that people like Blackmagic Design, Cineform, and Matrox will be able to get some decent products working well in CS4 64 bit Vista. Right now as far as I can tell Grass Valley/Canopus have Edius 5 and the Spark card working really well in 64 bit Vista. It runs today like a work horse. They also just released Firecoder Blue which works in 64bit Vista, and does hardware encoding/transcoding. Right now as far as I can tell Grass Valley/Canopus have the best set of products working well in 64 bit Vista? You just have to be ok with Edius and working largely with the Canopus codec.
Tilford Bartman
-
I am not a pro so I cannot answer the original question. I’m a FCP user and happy with it except for three things: it does not integrate as well with After Effects and other programs (there’s actually a gamma shift when importing), it gives me the red render bar if I just add a few effects, and it does not include its own codec.
I realize PPro can edit many more formats than FCP, but this does not mean that its own high quality would not be useful. AVCHD is much easer on the CPU if transcoded into an editing format, and now, with RED, people are transcoding RedCode RAW into an intermediate codec for proxy editing. Avid and now FCP both have high quality codecs. PPro adds this feature alone on CS5, I’ll definitely switch. I wonder if some pros would too.
-
Well, FCP has its own codecs for a couple of years now, first Apple Intermediate Codec and now ProRes. It’s Premiere who hasn’t any intermediate codec. But you’re right that Premiere can import more file formats than FCP.
-
[Jiri Fiala]
“Well, FCP has its own codecs for a couple of years now, first Apple Intermediate Codec and now ProRes. It’s Premiere who hasn’t any intermediate codec…”I was in a conversation when posting and I and realize my post makes no sense (too late to edit now). What I meant to say is that I’m happy with FCP except the gamma shift when importing and the fact that it gives the red render bar when adding just a few effects. PPro, as far as I know, does not suffer from these problems.
The reason I prefer FCP is that it has ProRes. If PPro CS5 comes out with its own high quality codec, I’ll switch to PPro.
-
On a slightly unrelated note, I have tried PPro CS4 under Vista 64 today and am flabbergasted as to how much better it is under it compared to XP 32bít. The thing crawled with XP, but with Vista x64, it flies (with the same hardware)! The same goes for After Effects CS4 – the project that took over 40 secs on XP (a very clean HP workstation) opens within 15 secs with Vista. This goes to all the naysayers. Vista is mature after its three year run.
-
I’ve been using premiere for 8 years. I learned to edit on it and have seen it develop over the years since 6.5. Other then being extremely user friendly, between about 6.5 and CS2, Premiere lacked in many ways. Since about CS3 and CS4 the improvements are uncanny. There are many things which Final Cut still makes complicated, leaving the user with far more “switches to flick” then are necessary. Premiere gives you the ease of use and the option of control when needed.
In the digital age, PP is on par professionally with FCP. It’s able to edit virtually all file types (Red and XDCAM included) directly. It runs perfectly stable for me (Dual-Quad Core Mac) often for a week or two straight without shutting down. I have FCP as well and it will sometimes crash with disagreeable or changing files types. I find that FCP also uses more resources for menial task as well.
I will admit that the stability of Encore is less then desirable. This is unfortunate for PS, AE, PP and Flash users because the software is otherwise excellent and well connected. It’s difficult to customize DVD Studio Pro when PS is the standard for design and DVD layout creations.
That’s my two sence. Other then that, in my opinion, Avid and Media 100 are falling behind. “Onlining” is dieing and they’re going to be left in some very expensive dust. User friendly, processor friendly and file type friendly software will be the ultimate winner in the next few years.
Jason
Partner|www.stonecanoe.ca
-
I agree I think PPRo has a great future.
I remember version 6.5 as a break through.
I started editing on an Avid (MC version 2?) and stuck with that through 11 and then switched to FCP and still do that when necessary, but have PC version of the CS4 Production Suite running at home and now do nearly on my work on it.
It’s a living… -
What’s a professional system? I’ve paid for half of a Adobe CS4 production system with the first project so in my eyes, yes PP CS4 is a professional system. But it wasn’t always that way.
In the beginning, I was fascinated by digital video editing but had little money to spend so I built my own Premiere 4.2 on Windows 98 and a Pinnacle DC30 card. Definitely not professional but I now know about rebuilding operating systems weekly, incompatible drivers and more pain than I care to remember. By learning the NLE technology the hard way and solving digital work-flows it built my confidence and I know my ability to get the job done. I stared landing a few paying projects while I kept my day job that had now evolved into being a NLE specialist at a large VAR. I integrating expensive pro gear but I could afford these systems.
Along the way I upgraded but wasn’t satisfied until the issues were worked out of the CS2 suite with a Matrox RTX100 card on a dual Xeon XP system used to author DVD’s. With it, I made enough money to pay for a CS4 Creative Suite. So far so good actually it’s a great system. While building it, I noticed I/O card companies were not able to release stable drivers for CS4 so I’ve stayed away from them for now and built a stable computer with an ASUS P5E Deluxe motherboard, Intel 9450 Dual Core CPU, ATI 4850 Graphics, 8GB RAM and Vista 64. There were a few minor issues that seem to be solved with the latest CS4 releases.
Now that my day job has vanished, I’m debating another professional position or evolving into an independent media producer. I would feel very confident using the Adobe CS4 tools but realize there are many other great systems available. So far I’ve spent around $6K on the system including Genelec monitors and the best 42″ consumer plasma screen I could find. I have a few more purchases to go before it’s complete.
Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced audio control surface for 5.1 BD authoring maybe one with 7.1 capabilities anticipating this in a future CS release. Also, does anyone know about the Bluefish444 video cards? They have excellent specs but they are expensive and are they stable? Can anyone tell me how the Matrox MX02 Mini has worked for them?
-
I can’t speak for what other professionals do or do not use, but I will say this – I’ve used Premiere since the 90’s and I stay FAR away from it if it’s anything I really care about.
It’s a shame too, because it does honestly have a very user-friendly interface, but it’s been a buggy, unstable mess for several years now, even on a Mac with more system resources than it could ever need. It’s made me wonder if Adobe has any kind of quality control. To say it has a few, “quirks”, is just sorely understating it.
No editor’s perfect, but I think of it this way – do you want to work on your project, or work on your software? Meaning, if Premiere was a car, would you like to spend your time with it driving, or spend your time with it under hood wondering why it’s once again inexplicably not working properly?
I think that’s Adobe’s job and they repeatedly fail, in my opinion, to release something that can be honestly marketed as “pro”.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up