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FCPX – Should we move to Premiere???
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[Bob Woodhead] “perhaps you could help the OP’s question with a related one of my own – what is better currently about PPro over FCPX?”
At the risk of this thread degenerating into another forum rumble, I’ll try to answer this. While you say the cost isn’t a factor, do recognize that AE, PSD, etc. can be replaced with other tools. However, I suspect that’s an even harder lift than the NLE. Like you, I’ve worked on a ton of different NLEs and currently bounce around among MC, FCPX, PPro, and maybe soon, Resolve. There are things I love and hate about each and simply don’t see one “best” tool. Different tools are “best” for different types of projects. So, I’m either ambidextrous or schizophrenic – take your pick ☺
First, I’m not totally sure what you mean by intranet. Most shared environments I encounter these days are networked shared storage solutions (NAS), like Promise V-Track or QNAP that are connected via 1Gig or 10Gig ethernet. These are closed loops for the connected systems. Is that what you mean? If so, proxy editing isn’t really a requirement.
Either FCPX or Premiere will work fine in your set-up. The biggest edge for Premiere is that more people know it and as you bring in folks from the outside, you’ll find more people who can step right into Premiere than can FCPX. Second is that it’s cross-platform, so the shop isn’t tied to only using Macs. This means (optionally) you can shift to PCs with advanced Nvidia cards and really dive deeper into Premiere’s power than with Macs. That being said, Premiere works fine with MBPs, iMacs and MPs and can take advantage of both OpenCL and Metal acceleration.
For me, I see a big advantage in that there’s a more direct correlation between folder/subfolder/media location on your drives/NAS and the Premiere browser bins than there is with FCPX. You can certainly bring in media and leave it in place without optimizing in X, but if you want to maintain that organized structure of folders = bins, it’s much easier to do in the “traditional” NLE approach of Premiere. This also ties to more versatile relinking. For example, if you change the attributes of a media file, external to FCPX, it will only relink under very limited conditions. With Premiere, I can force a relink like in the FCP7 days. Also, Premiere will handle a wider range of oddball formats than X. These days you get all manner of camera crap back from shoots – 5 cameras – 5 different formats. While I personally prefer to transcode many and at least rename a lot, I can bring these into Premiere and start working if I so choose.
Beyond that, it gets down to the UI itself. You either like Premiere or you don’t. Forgetting the issue of tracks for the moment (which I don’t really have a problem with), I find the Premiere UI is much more responsive than X. With X, almost every UI action is accompanied by tiny little UI animations, which I feel retard the performance for the operator, especially on an older machine. With Premiere, these things are more instant. Panels allow much greater personalization of the UI for an operator. Multiple open sequences can be a godsend on large projects. Premiere offers better timecode-based editing, when you need to make entries and edits based on numerical input. There’s tracking of out-of-sync offsets. Built-in tracking and masking for every effect (not 3rd party). On and on. Of course, there’s an equal list on the side of X.
Does that answer it a bit?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Alex James] “1. Motion Templates: With different projects moving to different computers, or a project being revisited months later. We often have problems of missing plugins and struggle to keep our machines coherent. Could this issue be solved with premier?”
Third party plug-ins will always be a problem for everyone. You want to make sure every system has the same software versions and same set of plug-ins. With Premiere, don’t think so much about templates. I would assume these are After Effects compositions, which are imported into your Premiere project. The AE project should live on your NAS in the same place as the rest of the files for that project. As long as the machines have the same builds, then a project cut on system A should open just fine on system B six months later.
[Alex James] “2. Transcoded media: With FCPX DATA is essentially doubled, I.e the PRORES files that are created within the optimised media folder to work best with FCPX are in addition to our original RUSHES on our NAS and are taking more space the necessary. I suppose this is a separate question but if we stop optimising media will we see FCPX start to run much slower? – Whereas Premiere on the other hand works with the native format.”
I would suggest not to optimize in X, but that depends on the media. If you do everything with RED, then you might be best to only transcode to proxies and work from there. Then toggle back to original media for finishing. The same conditions apply with Premiere, although it’s more comfortable with a range of camera formats, whereas X will require optimization for some.
[Alex James] “3. AE Integration: Is the integration with aftereffects really that good? As much as I’d love to find an awesome Motion editor, they seem to be virtually non-existent here in Ireland.”
Photoshop, After Effects, and Pro Tools are probably the three most entrenched applications in this business. While there are alternatives, you won’t find many using them.
There is a good roundtrip between Premiere and AE. Let’s say you have 5 clips in a sequence and send them to AE. They go as a group to a new AE project, where either you or another designer can manipulate them. This is more or less how FCP7/Motion roundtrips worked. You have the option of doing this as a roundtrip or simply sending them to AE.
When you do this as a roundtrip, the 5 clips are replaced in the Premiere timeline by a single AE composition. When the AE comp is completed and saved, this updates in the Premiere timeline. At that point it’s a live clip, which is actually running through an instance of AE “under the hood”. You can then render-and-replace on the timeline, which replaces the live composition with a “baked” media file. However, if you subsequently choose to edit-in-original, the baked file is linked to the AE comp and sends you back into AE where you can make changes. You can also simply bring in compositions from AE and it works in a similar manner. A similar process can be used for simple animations created in Photoshop, too. These would also be live and updates made in PSD ripple back into that Premiere project.
[Alex James] “4. Future of FCPX: I feel Apple have shown an enthusiasm of late for FCPX with major updates, the introduction of SMB and a far more professional overhaul feel to the NLE in 10.3. Although some of my colleagues feel a danger of being left high and dry like with the death of FCP7. What are peoples thoughts on this?”
Impossible to read those tea leaves. It’s Cupertinology, just like Kremlinology. ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “First, I’m not totally sure what you mean by intranet.”
Consider a geographically distributed corporate environment, where camera files and editors could be in different states. GigE network speeds at best, with fiber, switches, etc, between.
[Oliver Peters] “For me, I see a big advantage in that there’s a more direct correlation between folder/subfolder/media location on your drives/NAS and the Premiere browser bins than there is with FCPX.”
This used to bug me when I switched to X, but these days I’m pretty happily divorced from most physical camera asset organization and very much liking the metadata+keyword approach. Relinking… I certainly had issues a while ago with X some time back when I used proxies more often than I do now. Relinking & proxies as pertains to a “remote edit” workflow could be a crux matter.
[Oliver Peters] “Beyond that, it gets down to the UI itself. “
Yeah, I prefer PPro’s tear-off panels to X’s semi-customizable UI, and I agree the UI animations & thumbnails in X need to hit the trash, but in whole I find editing is X is much faster than a track environment (YMMV of course!), so I just deal with those nuisances.
How robust would a large broll library in PPro (Bridge?) be? Say 5TB, 20,000 clips. The one I’m using in X is about 1.5TB, 6,000 clips, and it’s fast as I could want. Cut from it into other projects, file management no worries. Multiple keyword, metadata, etc, coverage.
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[Alex James] “1. Motion Templates: With different projects moving to different computers, or a project being revisited months later. We often have problems of missing plugins and struggle to keep our machines coherent. Could this issue be solved with premier?”
There is a new option, I believe that started with 10.3, that allows you to keep Motion templates in the Library itself. This helps tremendously when moving from machine to machine. The option is in the preferences. This won’t solve issues of third party plugins, those have to be on all machines, but any custom generated Templates should travel with ease between machines as long as you move the library:
[Alex James] “2. Transcoded media: With FCPX DATA is essentially doubled, I.e the PRORES files that are created within the optimised media folder to work best with FCPX are in addition to our original RUSHES on our NAS and are taking more space the necessary. I suppose this is a separate question but if we stop optimising media will we see FCPX start to run much slower? – Whereas Premiere on the other hand works with the native format.”
This wholly depends on what formats you are using. I very rarely transcode to ProRes when editing in fcpx.
[Alex James] “3. AE Integration: Is the integration with aftereffects really that good? As much as I’d love to find an awesome Motion editor, they seem to be virtually non-existent here in Ireland.”
I find that Dynamic Link from Pr to Ae is very cumbersome. I don’t know any Motion artists either, everyone we work with uses Ae. But there are tools to get FCPX timelines to Ae really easily, and they are cheap. If you need that kind of integration, it’s out there. I use them all the time as I interact with Ae artists daily.
[Alex James] “4. Future of FCPX: I feel Apple have shown an enthusiasm of late for FCPX with major updates, the introduction of SMB and a far more professional overhaul feel to the NLE in 10.3. Although some of my colleagues feel a danger of being left high and dry like with the death of FCP7. What are peoples thoughts on this?”
FCPX is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Apple has made recent announcements that they are going to rethink the MacPro (again) and computers for professional users needs. If you like the Mac environment, like me, then perhaps this is good news to you.
This will sound a little alarmist, but I have a trust issue with Adobe, their last Pr release (before this latest patch) was deleting media. This is the second time that an Adobe CC update has started trashing very important files off of the hard drive in just over a year. This time it was media, last time it started at the top of the drive alphabetically. Both times, it was fixed by Adobe pretty quickly. That kind of thing makes me shutter. Even with backups, even with clones, straight up deleting files would cost us dearly.
https://forums.adobe.com/message/9503050
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[Bob Woodhead] “Consider a geographically distributed corporate environment, where camera files and editors could be in different states. GigE network speeds at best, with fiber, switches, etc, between”
I’m not sure either NLE would deal with this well. I’m assuming live access to media located across the country. Plus how do you actual manage where to access the media from? I’m not sure these sorts of existing networks are really designed to transfer video data in real time consistently. I’m just simply not a believer in these approaches, just like cloud editing.
[Bob Woodhead] “How robust would a large broll library in PPro (Bridge?) be? Say 5TB, 20,000 clips. The one I’m using in X is about 1.5TB, 6,000 clips, and it’s fast as I could want. Cut from it into other projects, file management no worries. Multiple keyword, metadata, etc, coverage.”
Hmm. I don’t know. Generally Premiere does OK with a ton of media and less so with tons of sequences. But remember, depending on format, Premiere goes through a process of conforming files and generating .pek audio data. This would take a long time the first time you do it. That info wants to stay local, so that means each machine would generate these files. Bridge could certainly be an option, but I would not recommend Premiere for this. Remember that you can only have one Premiere project open at a time. Therefore, you wouldn’t be able to open the library project and pull from that into another project for use in editing. Of course, you could actually use X to create a quick sequence of selects and then bring that into Premiere via XtoCC.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks everybody,
I think what I’ve been trying to conclude is if Premiere will substantially benefit our company by offering lots additional features and overall a better NLE, but to conclude and after doing a lot more research, dabbling a little with it myself I don’t feel that Premiere will substantially benefit our company. In fact the change will be far more disruptive.
If after my initial question, If I had gotten an overwhelming response from people saying ‘Premiere all the way’ then this would have definitely raised an eyebrow. Although it seems as like most things, there are Pros and Cons to both FCPX and Premiere with both NLE’s capable of delivering quality end products.
Alex James
TINY ARK
http://www.tinyark.com -
Being in the Adobe-camp for a few key reasons I can say a lot of things aren’t as impressive as they make it sound.
– Tracks are key for my work doing online / finishing. FCPX is far to messy. Having lanes for video would probably solve this but not so yet.
– Relinking is imparritive for me. Every iteration of FCPX has had issues with this. This is virtually not an issue in PP.
– XML / EDL / AAF i/o is impartivie. This is virtually a non-issue in PP as long as you know how to make the app work the way you want.
– A/V output is chockling unresponsive in FCPX. This isn’t an issue in PP.
– Dynamic linking I’ve never really found that impressive in PP, on the opposite you really need to know what works and to to make it work for you. It’s of course better than anything out there but it’s not THE solution. Copy & paste items from PP to AR works 90%. Filters are very much hit and miss. You’re still forced to organize everything in Finder, PP and AE. For the most part I always render everything out from AE manually adding it to the edit in PP. Force relink however works even if files change format, coded or duration.
– CC media files are very much hit an miss. For example rendings of .ai files is horrible in PP, AE sorts this perfectly but then having PP or FCPX doesn’t really matter – aside from the relinking issues I’ve had with FCPX (i.e. force updating file on disk).
– Format / codec support in PP is amazing and can also be a bane. But it’s wide support is a life-save and we’ve even had projects where AVID editors where required to use PP for this technical reason.
– The GUI of PP is something like a polished cluster f’k. FCPX looks so much better. I’m primary taking looks but to a degree also funktion. That said here FCPX has some massive downsides as well. Keeping track of media, source names / TC of various tracks and items in a timeline is a pain in the neck or impossible in FCPX vs PP. Comparing timelines also a pain, yet certain things in X are 10 times easier / faster.
Basically all systems have ups and downs. Some even remove your source media when clean out its cache! 😉
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I can also add PP sadly has a very unreliable graphics / rendering engine. It’s quite sad actually. One could say odd even. Given Adobe has some of the most used graphics and animation apps out there one would imagine better integration and consistency. Today this isn’t the case by a long shot and I doubt it ever will be.
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[Erik Lindahl] “- The GUI of PP is something like a polished cluster f’k. FCPX looks so much better. I’m primary taking looks but to a degree also funktion.”
You can layout the GUI anyway you want in Premiere Pro. Someone was supposed to do demo of how pancake editing works better in FCPX than in Premiere Pro.
[Erik Lindahl] “I can also add PP sadly has a very unreliable graphics / rendering engine. It’s quite sad actually. One could say odd even. Given Adobe has some of the most used graphics and animation apps out there one would imagine better integration and consistency. Today this isn’t the case by a long shot and I doubt it ever will be.”
AE and Premiere Pro work well together for me. Keep in mind they just added better integration with AE into the latest version of Premiere Pro. Having said that I am not sure what you want. Would you like Premiere Pro to have the same titling tools as Photoshop? It has that already. I am not sure what you want but the video below might be worth watching.
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[Erik Lindahl] “I can also add PP sadly has a very unreliable graphics / rendering engine.”
Odd. What sort of issues? I haven’t seen any specific problems working with multiple machines. Re-reading your previous post, do you specifically mean with .ai files? If so, that probably explains why I haven’t run into an issue.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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