Premier Pro CS4 VS Final Cut Express

[Muhammad Mushtaq]

HI
I use windows plateform and for Editing I have been using premiere pro 2. Many of my friends tell that Final Cut Pro is better than Premiere pro. In fact I was planning to upgrade to Premiere pro CS4. Please some one guide me should I go for final cut or primere pro CS4. In case I shift to final cut I shall have to switch to MAC.

Regards

[Dennis Radeke]

This is a loaded question to be sure and you’ll get biases of both on their respective forums.

A more appropriate comparison would be Premiere Pro vs Final Cut Pro or Production Premium vs Final Cut Studio

That being said, here would be my net conclusions. 1 – You can try 30 day trials of both probably and you should give them both a fair evaluation. 2 – You should use what works best for you. 3 – If you’re doing any pro work, chances are you’ll be using Adobe products anyway, so you could end up with Premiere Pro if you use Final Cut Pro/Express anyway. If budgets are tight, the advantage is for Premiere because you’ll probably use Photoshop and After Effects anyway.

In short, do some homework on both and good luck!

[Michel Munier]

Glad to see just a name and email seems enough to participate, I understand the aim of registration but also would like to underline what this forum seems to understand. People visit 100 of fora (hope I got that right!)and to registered into them every time is often pointless as it may be only one of.
Now to the topic, to evaluate a program in 30 days trial can be a big ask. Often people would rather stay with a lesser product than having to learn something new. Perhaps it’s ok for the “top brains” but today more and more people have simple cameras that take movies and it is so nice to be able to make those movie into something watch able and not to boring. But the limitation is in many area. One’s ability to use these programs – Budget and time for starter. So it’s nice to get other’s experience with a particular product and of course with the least of bias possible. My gathering so far is that CS4 seems to be quite involved but a good achiever and FCP seems to be perhaps more user friendly especially in the story board. I have only used Premiere 6.5 to now CS2 suite with Window XP. I love it but recently upgraded to HD JVC camera and have to see where I want to go. I keep hearing (and believing) “Mac” is the right tool for this kind of work. But as said before I’m used to “Windows” and I’m not looking forwards to start from scratch again! Yes do your homework and if you want to get it right you could have a new version on both products by the time you get it right!

[Michel Munier]

Ha ha, how naive of me to think I could post without registration!
(I’m supposed to have replied to this post but I’m in “moderation” ! Anyway Hello all and thanks for sharing and helping others 🙂

[Ed Isenberg]

I have used Premiere Pro for four years in a professional environment. It often will fail while outputting a video file, with useless messages like “an error occurred.” It is not as stable as Avid. Can’t say much about Final Cut Pro, but I’m trying it next because Premiere Pro is so unstable.