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Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere
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You are right. I should have said that I don’t have a PC.
“Don’t take our Macs away from us” as Caleb said.
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While I use FCP and like it there is a major problem with it and it’s the integration with After Effects. AE is the de-fact standard in post-production and simply THE one app used in motion graphics. The integration with Maxon Cinema 4D is simply amazing and one more reason to use After Effects in my pipeline. Sorry but Motion can’t come even close and Shake doesn’t integrate with FCP that well either.
I do have a workflow from FCP to AE but it could be much better and the integration between Premiere and After Effects is becoming more and more inviting and I’m seriously considering the switch. That and the aforementioned consistency in the UI, very ironic that Apple is the main offender here, is a very strong point in supporting Premiere. -
[Jerry Hofmann] “That said, the notion that roundtripping is not supported in FCP isn’t correct by any means… all the apps round trip in the Studio.”
Yeah, kinda. They do it or at least attempt to do it, but some of them not very well. Believe me, i’d like nothing better for it to “just work” in FCP. The Soundtrack Pro round trip is much improved than in earlier versions ( at least you can export and bring back multichannel mixes now, but it’s not a real ’round trip’ although the new conform feature is cool). Color integration is okay. It works great if you know what to look out for and how to prep your timelines and then subsequently reconstruct the timeline when it comes back. I am sure that will get improved as time goes on. FCP to Motion and back is pretty much useless for me. Motion has some really cool things about it but man trying to use it is like pulling teeth with no painkillers. Even simple animations crash and the rendering back in FCP is slow.
The frameworks are there, the implementation needs help. I am not trying to flame, just commenting on my experiences is all. Like I said, it’d be great if it worked.
Jeremy
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Not trying to get into a contest here at all. I agree with what you’ve written here. Though a single feature hardly points at slow development IMHO.
However I’d venture to guess the single largest installed base of NLE’s is FCP… over a million registered users now. Don’t know the statistics for the other apps, but figure it’s not as large.
Heck in 1999 when Avid was the winner in the numbers wars, they only had 80,000 bays in the field.
Buy the software that works for your workflow is always my opinion… if it’s working, don’t fix it.
I do however find it interesting that any NLE vs NLE thread in one or the other’s forum here, results in both sides chiming in. I’m not bashing anybody’s NLE here… Premiere is a fine app, just that FCP is a more successful one as far as I can see. See the floor at NAB lately? cripes 99 out of a hundred booths showing ANY NLE software are showing FCP… it’s most the talk there and has been for quite a long time now.
Quite frankly, I wasn’t all that surprised with Apple pulled out of the show floor. With Avid not showing, they had nothing to lose also pulling out in their opinion, and mine… they are so strongly represented by every other booth there that has a need to show NLE software, that it’s not as if you couldn’t see them there anyway… I also hear Adobe’s booth will be much smaller. Actually the take on all of this by Ron Lindeboom is dead on I think. Take a read: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/lindeboom_ron/Apple_Departs_NAB2008.php
Jerry
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[Paolo Ciccone] “I do have a workflow from FCP to AE but it could be much better and the integration between Premiere and After Effects is becoming more and more inviting and I’m seriously considering the switch”
And that’s where the line gets drawn. It’s about your workflow and what will work better for you. If you use a lot of AE, Premiere might be a better choice, but not until you can capture with AJA cards 😉 Also, Premiere works much better with image sequences if that’s something you need/want.
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It basically boils down to what do you need to do, what workflow do you need to use to make your project work, and which NLE will fill the needs of that workflow.
Since the big three NLEs (Avid, FCP, Premiere) all have different strengths and weaknesses, they all work better in given situations. Figure out what your situation is and plug in the edit software that solves that situation.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
http://www.LFHD.net
Read my blog! -
I believe one of the biggest differences is FCP had a more broad support for different Codecs and formats including it’s own ProRes 422.
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What will happen when Adobe buys Avid…..hmmmm..just food for thought…..cause it could happen, soon….
Paul Harb-Director/Editor
Wrong Beach Multimedia -
[Hector Silva] “I think it’s safe to say that anything that can be done in Premiere can be done in Final Cut and then some.”
I actually think that is quite perilous to say…not safe at all.
Since this discussion hasn’t really had any devil’s advocate, I’ll dive in, just to offer another perspective.
I have both systems…FCS 2 and CS3…they each have sweet spots. Apple has dominated the television/film industry…I don’t think there’s much doubt about that, but PPro had the first motion RAW on-the-timeline workflow with ability to manipulate the demosaic, etc…about 18 months-2 years before FCP could at least lay RED RAW on the timeline. And the CineForm codec on the PPro side was the first feature film compressed online (direct to the film recorder, no uncompressed conform) ever done…not DNxHD…and two years before ProRes existed.
PPro can handle audio on the video timeline at the sample level…yes, sub-frame. You can change the timeline to “audio units” and go in and remove a click or pop by simply setting up the volume handles to cut out the audio for…three or four samples…and simply play it back. Your ears can’t even detect a several sample gap in the sound.
I’m currently editing a project where the output frame size is 1024×768 (computer-based training) and I have Photoshop docs, 2 layers of DV, a layer of Camtasia screen cap footage, all on the timeline at once, with multiple sources visible at any one time…the timeline plays back in RT and I export to Flash at about 1.3x RT.
There are any number of things you can point out that PPro does that FCS doesn’t…and I think that even Apple users would have to agree that Apple’s suite has a distance to go to match the level of integration of Adobe’s suite.
Each one does it’s own thing…if you’re handling DVC ProHD…FCP is the way to go…ProRes is great stuff as long as you don’t need RGB color space or a bigger framesize than HDTV…FCP’s TC handling seems somewhat more intuitive to me…the addition of “Color” to FCS certainly sets a professional tone for the suite and gives a functional advantage over CS3, but it’s been a year…it’s time for it to playback…and PPro has its merits as well.
There’s nothing wrong with liking one more than another, but there are relatively few people who know enough about BOTH to really give much of an objective functional comparison from what I can tell…I like them both…and I dislike them both. They both have a lot of functionality, and they both just seem to keep growing into these bloated behemoths of code…
It’s refreshing once in a while to open up Vegas and see how agile and elegant a video editing program can be…
OK…now you guys can all pounce.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Jeremy Garchow] “If you use a lot of AE, Premiere might be a better choice, but not until you can capture with AJA cards ;)”
I’ve been using AJA cards for years with PPro…not sure what you mean here…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net
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