Does anyone use PPro as a professional?

[Nick Brown]

I’ve found CS5.5 very stable. What version are you using. What is your OS? What graphics card are you using? What computer are you using?

[David Dobson]

I have also used PPro since the 90’s. I have also used Final Cut and Avid since their beginnings. All of them are quirky. But it’s been a long time since PPro was more trouble than it was worth and I use it professionally every day. CS5 (and.5) blows FCP7 out of the water in terms of power, functionality and stability, at least on the systems that I run them both on, pc and mac for PPro. I haven’t tried FCPX, but what I’ve heard has convinced me to migrate my FCP clients to PPro. But everyone should work with what makes them the most creative and productive and that earns them a living. Having said that, once a upon a time, my disappointment with Adobe and PPro was pretty great. They have utterly redeemed themselves in the last few years.

[Rikk Wolf]

Right now, I’m on a Mac Pro with a 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 15 GB of memory, an ATI Radeon HD 2600 video card and I’m running on OSX 10.5.8.

I’m envious (because I do like the interface). I’ve used every version of Premiere since 2.0 over five different computers on both PC & Mac, and it’s never behaved as a finished product, more as a buggy beta test that makes you really wonder what Adobe’s thinking. I figured ditching my old, ill-equipped PC and moving to Mac with more system resources than it could ever need would be the answer, but it runs almost just as poorly on Mac.

It usually runs decently enough at first, but it takes so little to bog it down. I can have 10 times the media loaded into Final Cut Pro and it doesn’t bat an eye, running near-flawlessly on my machine. Beyond that, however, all the media cache files Premiere generates make it a system hog in my opinion, so even if it wasn’t incredibly unstable, I’d probably still pass on it (not that other editors don’t produce memory soaking files, but Premiere seems the worst about it).

Judging from the thousands of webpages you can Google about Premiere having product-breaking issues, I’m far from the only one that considers Premiere non-pro. I do like it when it functions properly, but I just can’t trust my paycheck to such flaky software.

But if you can do what you do on it and it runs fine, more power to you. 🙂

[David Dobson]

The question was, “Does anyone use PPro as a professional?”
The answer is “yes.”

You can’t, for some reason … oh well.

[Rikk Wolf]

I’m not the type to demean others for using what runs properly for them and what they’re comfy with. If you like PPro and it runs just fine for you – great, use it to make pure awesomeness. I honestly like it’s interface better than I do FCP’s. I wish I could use it for more important projects.

I’m simply being factual – I’ve used every version since 2.0 on numerous brand new machines with the required system stats and every project I’ve been a part of that used Premiere as its base suffered from some inexplicable, project -threatening bug or issue that a piece of “pro” software just shouldn’t be having, and I’ve met more people than not that stay away from it for similar reasons. Every project I’ve been on that used FCP, it was mostly smooth sailing. Just my personal experience.

On my Mac, FCP7 never gives me trouble, whereas Premiere CS5 often develops dooming issues later on in projects like the inability to save, crashes while loading media, crashes for no apparent reason, won’t be able to playback a timeline, generates corrupted render files, is easily overloaded, loses track of plugins, etc. etc. etc.

If FCP7 runs poorly compared to Premiere on your system, but all means use it.

I think the lesson here is everyone’s machine is going to handle things differently.

[David Dobson]

On my Mac, Premiere CS5 never gives me trouble, whereas FCP7 often develops dooming issues later on in projects like the inability to save, crashes while loading media, crashes for no apparent reason, won’t be able to playback a timeline, generates corrupted render files, is easily overloaded, loses track of plugins, etc. etc. etc.

Interesting difference of experience we have had.

I can say that I have not had good luck with PPro and ATI Video cards. I get only nVidia cards and since I stared doing that, PPro has run better on a whole whole of different PCs that I built myself. I think the Mac I work on has a Radeon card like yours, 8 cores, 16GB of ram and Final Cut 7 is quite buggy, but with upgrades to the OS now ahead of upgrades to FCP7 (i.e. none ever again) who knows how much longer I’ll be able to use it.

When will you switch to FCPX? I hear it’s improved a bit since it’s disastrous release.

[Rikk Wolf]

I’m envious! I actually would prefer to use Premiere because I’m more familiar with it, although I do like how easy it is to export a lossless file from FCP. Premiere CS5 makes you work a little too hard for that, in my opinion on Mac.

Disastrous sounds about right. The first I saw of FCPX, it was the target of a Conan O’Brien sketch.

I’m not sure I’ll ever upgrade, as FCP7 runs like a champ for me and I get done what I need to get done just fine with it. What does FCPX have over FCP7?