Final Cut vs. Premiere Pro for editing on Mac???

[Jessica Mantheiy]

Honestly, Premiere isn’t hard. It’s the same thing as FCP7, but everything is just in different places. You can switch the keyboard layout so it has the same functions as FCP as it does in Premiere (if that’s what you are most familiar with). And yes, it is much easier to use the other related Adobe products, such as After Effects, Photoshop, etc., through their Dynamic Link that Adobe uses to send projects to one another.

Premiere is awesome. CS6 is the way to go, if you have it, or even CS5.

Jessica Muth
jmuth01@gmail.com

[Ryan Holmes]

Alison – I’ve switched over to PPRo as my primary editor. If you’re moving to CS6, you probably won’t look back once you move. It’s easy and as Jessica said, you can easily map all the keyboard shortcuts to be your usual FCP settings. But even if you don’t the PPro shortcuts aren’t hard to pickup. I recommend downloading the 30 day trial from Adobe and try kickin it around. I think you’ll be surprised.

As for FCP7, it’s dead software. Apple has moved to FCPX and they are not developing, patching, or supporting FCP7 any longer (or Color, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor 3, etc.). So there is no guarantee how long FCP7 will continue to work on an Apple machine. I’ve heard that FCP7 still runs on the newest OS Mountain Lion, but again it isn’t supported. So you’re only one Apple software update away from FCP7 failing to launch. Technically the last supported OS build for FCP7 was 10.6.8 – Snow Leopard.

I suspect that FCP7 will continue to be used for the next several years, but people will start moving to other software – Avid, PPro, Autodesk, or FCPX. Given the amount of choices right now as an editor you can pickup any NLE software from the big A companies and it will run on a current gen Mac.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Dan Hyman]

I switched to Premiere CS6 and it’s ok. I know it’s going to fall on deaf ears but hang onto FCP 7 as long as you can. It was as close to a perfect, simple, pro editing solution as you’re going to get.

I’ve found Premiere is good, it’s ok.. but it’s “sticky” and “clunky”.. how’re those for pro terms?
You can change the settings to get close to FCP 7, but there will be a learning, well adjustment curve

[Errol Lazare]

I am going to agree with Dan.
Premiere has good features and it is nice to not have to transcode but it is a very heavy program that seems to lag and take longer to do things that Final cut pro would do.

If I were to compare premiere pro and final cut to vehicles, Premiere would be a Semi-Truck and Final Cut would be sports car. Now this comparison is for things that really annoy me as to why they take so long.
I am on a Mac Pro 12-core and these are some of the delays I am experiencing:

Saving Project:
Premiere: 10-15 seconds
Final Cut: 3 Seconds

Preparing to export to Media Encoder
Premiere: 1-5 minutes
Final Cut: 10 seconds to compressor

Exporting a 30-minute clip:
Premiere: 45-minutes
Final Cut: 10-minutes

Premiere pro also asks to render when you have nested sequences while final cut doesn’t.

I could go on a rant about premiere because I am experiencing it’s clunky slowness at the moment and trying to finish a project on time…. but there are things that I still really like about it like it’s multi-camera feature, but I just wish it were faster at doing normal every day tasks. If Adobe could make it more streamlined and “lighter” then it would be the best program!

Hope that helps. The only way to know if it is right for you is to download the trial version and see how you like it. Perhaps these problems are what I am experiencing but maybe others are completely happy with premiere.

Errol X. Lazare
EXL Films
http://www.exlfilms.com

[Dennis Radeke]

Some interesting and good information, but I would point out a couple of things here…

Saving Project: there is an auto-save that is turned on by default. I’m also a big proponent of using the Media Browser to keep project tidy, but that’s a whole ‘nuther conversation…

Preparing to export: Are you saying you’re having a 1 minute delay before you can export? I’d like to dive into that with the details about the project…

Exporting a clip: Two GIANT points here. You’re not factoring in all of the transcoding you did with FCP7 on the inbound side. This cannot be overestimated in most scenarios. Second, FCP7 has smart rendering on ProRes on output which decreases the export time. We have added that (along with many other codecs) for Premiere Pro CC.

At the end of the day, download a trial (either CS6 today or CC upcoming) and see how it works for you Alison…

Dennis – Adobe guy…