Premiere or After Effects first?

[Todd Kopriva]

> “…but if you were a video editing beginner looking to edit short movies and documentaries, which program would you start learning; Adobe Premiere or After Effects? “

Premiere Pro.

After Effects is for motion graphics and compositing. Learn Premiere Pro first for the tasks that you mention in your question.

See this page for resources for learning Premiere Pro:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/878529

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
———————————————————————————————————

[Crye Biggie]

Thank you, bro. Most people think same. But how about the CPU/Memory demands?

Altitude is not all the problem. Taking steps is more of it.

[Jon Doughtie]

Without knowing what media types you are working with, and how effects-intensive your timelines might be, the whole CPU/memory discussion is kinda moot.

If you are asking what Adobe’s system requirements are, that can be found here. . .

https://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/tech-specs.html#requirements

[Michael Szalapski]

After Effects is not editing software. If you are looking to make documentaries, you need editing software. Premiere is a Non-Linear Editor. That is what you need.

Premiere can do some basic animation and motion graphics while you’re getting started and you can learn After Effects later if you need to.

[Crye Biggie] ” But how about the CPU/Memory demands?”

This is like comparing apples and oranges. They both are built to do completely different tasks and they both handle video entirely differently. Premiere is built for real-time playback whereas After Effects is built to completely render each frame.
The system requirements are available for both programs on their respective tech spec pages.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Crye Biggie]

For my purposes I should go with Premiere Pro at this time then.

I always knew the main distinction between them but I was thinking such projects could be completed in AE time/resource-effectively (like 40 mins shorts/docs etc??). But now the frames/preview thing. Well done, guys!

Altitude is not all the problem. Taking steps is more of it.