NLE Discussion

[Tim Wilson]

So what did you have to say? Nothing personal to those other guys, but I’d rather not wade through them to get to you. What’re you thinking these days?

[Oliver Peters]

Now what would the fun be in that? But my general thoughts these days are that I use all four as needed, but love and hate them all!

[Tim Wilson]

Kidding aside, kingdoms will rise, kingdoms will crumble into the sea, the earth will fall into the sun, and the sun will go nova before I listen to a single podcast. I don’t have the emotional ability to sit still and let people yap at me at their own pace. Give me a transcript or give me death.

[Tony West]

I listened to this whole thing and enjoyed the conversation. I thought everyone had interesting points. I recently did my first client job in Pr and can certainly see why so many people like it. You can pretty much do anything you need to with that program. I used it on my nMP and it had no problems at all. Zero crashes. After using it and learning my way around one thing that jumped out at me in comparison to X, is that one of the things that I believe makes X “faster” for me to assemble is that X more times than not defaults to what I’m trying to do in the first place. A simple example would be if I go past an edit and set an out point, Pr will sets the in point at the beginning of the timeline (unless you select the clip), where as X will set it at the first edit point. Which 99.9% of the time is where I want it. How often am I going to want to delete the whole front end of my project. Enough of those simple defaults, while not that big of a deal, can add up over a long edit. I enjoyed my time with Pr and the client was happy with my work, but that came in the way I told the story more than anything. I have settled back into X until the next Pr job. Btw Tony was right about Fusion. I opened and closed it. Give me Motion : )

[Oliver Peters]

Tim – Simply three editors who use multiple NLEs discussing the pros and cons. Plus why someone might chose one or the other depending on the circumstances.

– Oliver

[Oliver Peters]

Tony – Thanks. Premiere works on standard 3-point editing, like FCP7. There is a pref setting for behavior when 4 points are picked. In that case the source and the timeline in-out duration won’t match. In Premiere you can select whether to stretch-to-fit or ignore either source or timeline outpoints. Plus you do have to manage target tracks. What takes a bit of getting used to, compared to Media Composer, for instance, is that Premiere bases targets on the source side.

Fusion makes more sense to people who prefer node compositing, which is the norm for traditional VFX compositors (Smoke, Flame, Nuke, etc). Motion makes more sense to people coming from a tracks/layers tool, like Photoshop, After Effects, Boris RED, etc.

But, speaking of Motion… Do you wish it was better integrated with FCPX or used some form of “send to” or dynamic linking function?

– Oliver

[Tony West]

Yeah, I guess I would like that, but what I would really like to see with Motion is for them to just add more elements to it. More backgrounds, more behaviors. Same with X. I think those are the same backgrounds they had when they first introduced the program. I know how Pr works, I just want it to default to the next edit like X. That’s how I cut. I usually just want some little sound taken out at the head of an edit. The other thing that I was surprised about was the suite. I thought you got everything but you don’t, unless you pay extra. I didn’t realize that. I was working from my client’s subscription. Seems like at least AF should come with Pr.

[Oliver Peters]

Correct. Your client must have been on a single application subscription. I think with Premiere you also get Media Encoder, but nothing else. Once you get past 3 apps, it makes more sense to subscribe to the full Creative Cloud subscription. When you do that, you get over 20 apps, plus mobile apps.

– Oliver

[Oliver Peters]

“I know how Pr works, I just want it to default to the next edit like X. That’s how I cut”

I’m confused. That is how Premiere works. When you do an overwrite edit, the timeline playhead is at the end of the edit that you just made. Am I missing something?

Edit – Or do you mean you want the focus to stay with the timeline panel after an edit is made? If so, there’s a pref setting for that.

– Oliver

[Tony West]

With the playhead just past an edit, when selecting “O”, I want the “in point” to default to the closest edit point like this example in X. Not the beginning of the timeline.