Premiere Pro alternatives

[Mike Cohen]

We used Media 100 from 1999 to 2005. When we had maxed out the capabilities of version 9.5, or whatever the last version that was on OS 9 was, we had a choice to make – buy new Macs x3 or switch to Premiere Pro 1.5 on PCs that we already had in-house.

I found Premiere CS3 to be the most stable, aside from a few deadly projects here and there. Now we run CS4 on all machines and the performance is different from the Core 2 Duo to the Core 2 Quad to the i7, as one would expect.

As others have said, editing native HDV is processor intensive – add some color correction and stay away from the older machines. We know what we have and how best to use each system.

In other words, know the limitations of what you have to work with. Before cutting a feature film on any editing system, make sure you know that you can do it, rather than finding out the hard way.

There is always a better mouse trap. However eventually you either get the cheese or get your tail caught.

Mike Cohen

[Maarten Mylemans]

Thanks for the info, Mike. Well, considering your feedback, it’s best I stay with CS3, because I’ve managed to complete a feature project with it before and so have a workflow in place that I know works.
Also because I know what can go wrong I can anticipate this.

Or if I had the budget, I’d just hire out all my post-production to another company! And pay them to stress over bugs 😀

[Tim Kolb]

[Maarten Mylemans] “Well, Tim, your positivity about Premiere encouraged me to take another look at my software issues and see if they aren’t indeed just my view filtered through a good bit of “rage view”.”

Well…I’m making no apologies for any manufacturer or product here…they all have areas where they shine and stumble. I just hate to see people throw money at the wrong problem…

Hopefully you find a way to reduce the headaches and get on with it…I know that it is very frustrating when you’re spending all your time troubleshooting.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Scott Sheriff]

Maarten
Some thoughts on Mac Pro running Final Cut.

I came to NLE’s from the CMX online world, with casual experience in Avid and Media 100. When I decided to buy my own system, I wasn’t biased one way or another, but needed to get the most bang for my buck. When I decided to put down the cash, I went Apple/FCP and never looked back, even though I have been a long time (remember IBM XT) PC Windows guy. Here are a few of my reasons, in no particular order.

1. The build quality of the Mac Pro is first rate. Open one up and look at the quality of the solder joints, no loose bundles of wires etc. The case isn’t cheap plastic, or stamped sheet metal. It’s easy to see where the money is going when you buy a Mac Pro. Very easy to add drives and memory, and the standard I/O ports are plentiful and conveniently located.

2.Software Price. With FCS, you get a suite of programs including DVD authoring, color correction, motion graphics and more, for a lot less than Avid MC.

3. Avid didn’t support the codec of my camera, even though it had been out for over 2 years. The Avid and JVC forums were loaded with complaints about lack of support for the 100/110 series cameras, as well as others. Avid seems unresponsive to changes in the market.

4. Dissatisfaction expressed by my Avid using friends, some of whom have their own MC systems. Main complaints seems to be lack of support for the smaller owners, in favor of the larger network type customers, a heavy reliance on expensive external hardware and third party software, and high cost to upgrade systems as the world changes.

5. No silly dongle.

6. The OS, Apps and hardware all from the same company. No worry about third party compatibility/driver issues. One stop shopping to keep the system up to date.

7. Hardware Price. By the time you spec out a PC to meet the Avid specs, you are in the same price range as a Mac Pro-see #1 above.

8. The Windows Vista debacle.

9. The perception by some in the biz, that Avid is moving more towards the server market, and away from the core NLE market.

10. I didn’t want to tinker with the system. I bought it to edit with and the Mac Pro/Final Cut solution seemed much more ‘turn-key’ than the Avid, with all the talk about how picky it was about qualified hardware.

As far as FCP issues, yes there are things that could work better. But, that is true in Avid, Vegas, AE or any other program. I’ve been in broadcast TV since 1981, and there isn’t a piece of gear that I have ever used that was perfect, and didn’t require some type of work-around, or have some limitation.
And honestly, 90% of the posts on the Cows FCP forum are ‘pilot error’ and could be easily solved if the person posting the problem would just read the manual, and follow the directions. A couple of good examples of this are all the people whingeing about the lack of QT 7 in Snow Leopard. Well in fact, it is on there, as is QT 10 if they would just bother to look. Or people posting all the problems they are having editing with H264, which is a delivery, not editing codec.
Another 5% are unrealistic expectations, and hardware/software bottlenecks from people on really old systems trying to work in an HD world.
The remaining 5% are real problems, and people pushing the envelope. In that 5%, the issues are usually workflow specific, and only affect a small group of users with a unique workflow.
My system arrived by UPS around 9am. By 1pm that same day, I was up and running and cutting some test footage together.
After 2 years, I can say I’m still very glad I chose FCP, and have had very few issues. And those I did have were minor, and solved by reading the manual. I looked at my system logs, which now only go back to Aug 30th, which is when I installed Snow Leopard, and could only find 2 crashes, neither of which involved the FCS Apps.
At least two of my friends with older Avid MC’s have switched to FCP after using my system, rather than upgrade their MC’s to go HD. While the only folks I know that are sticking with Avid, don’t actually own the system, or pay the bills to upgrade or maintain it.
Don’t get me wrong, Avid is a fine App, but look at all your options, I’m glad I did.

And for all the Avid fanboys out there, these are just my opinions, and experiences, and in no way meant to disparage the Avid, or Avid users.

[Phil Lowe]

No offense taken, as I’m not a fanboy of Avid’s networked “solutions”. Here are just 2 very recent rasons:

1. Spent 2 days working on 6:28 project that airs Monday night on Unity/Isis system. Last night (around 10:30 pm) after laying in last piece of music just before last shot was to go in, Newscutter XP on said Unity/Isis system informs me that the “Filesystem is busy” when it tries to save the bin to the network project folder. When I “raise the error”, I get a very cryptic message box that reads, essentially, bin not found. So I try to create a bin with a different name and save to that. Same error.

This goes on for 15 minutes (I’m on overtime) and so I make a QT backup of sequence to local storage then close Newscutter and reboot my system. When I get system back up and proceed to jump through all of Avid’s login hoops, I find that the renamed backup bin is there, but the original bin has completely disappeared from the server. Gone. Thank god the backup was there and I didn’t lose my project, but this is the kind of bullsh*t I’ve come to expect from Newscutter XP on a Unity/Isis system running Interplay.

Meanwhile, I’ll be asking my boss on Monday if I can cut next project on Media Composer with local storage (no networking) and send out as QT file to newscutter for air, turning Newscutter into nothing more than a very expensive import/transfer station for air. Otherwise, everything with this Newscutter system is one huge freaking disaster waiting to happen!

Which brings me to point…

2. Newscutter is worthless when it comes to importing QT animations with alphas! It does stills just fine, but whenever I import an animation with an alpha (premultiplied or straight, no difference), I get a black line along the top edge of the “fill” about 8 lines thick. Every time I get this, I have to step into the track with the matte key on it and add a resize effect to the fill, scaling it up by 5% or moving it by 8 lines up (moving it just send the black line to the bottom). It’s yet another workaround I have to deal with regarding Avid’s vaunted professional networked solution, Newscutter!

OK, while I’m on a roll, here’s point…

3. Major latency (lag) when hitting the space bar to start/stop playback of clips and/or sequences in Newscutter on Interplay (this was a new “feature” introduced with Interplay that we never had with Media Manager).

Hit the space bar to start playback and wait for as much as half a second for playback to start. But hit same spacebar to stop, and the timeline or clip may continue playing for up to 2 or 3 seconds past the point you actually wanted it to stop!

The most maddening thing about this one is that when you anticipate the lag on next attempt to get a tight outcue, it stops immediately, leaving you a couple of seconds ahead of where you should be! Yet repeat the start/stop process, and you get the same lag you had before!

I’m told this has to do with the “spring buffers filling and dumping” but – again – this was never a problem on MM, and is certainly not an issue with Media Composer on my laptop! Avid’s response to these issues is “use the J-K-L keys”, (instead of actually fixing things they’ve clearly broken) but when your keyboard is set up for a workflow you’ve been using for 15 years, changing habits is not an easy thing to do. Chalk this up to another Avid workaround.

4. Avid Pan & Zoom plug in: Stills or scanned image brought in through this ALWAYS import extremely blurry, even in RT mode, until you render them. My workaround for doing documents using this P.O.S. plug in is to keep Windows’ Picture and Fax viewer open in second monitor as a roadmap to see where I need to move virtual camera. Just another example of how some of Avid’s “solutions” create more problems than they solve!

I could go on: a capture tool that causes exception errors and crashes almost every time you open it (even though Avid’s soluion is to keep it closed.) Memory leaks, media ingested into server that shows up one second only to appear completely offline another, constant other workstation crashes and system hangs, a media tool that can’t read P2 media until you add a half dozen steps to the process (like refreshing media databases, mounting, unmounting, then remounting cards, etc.)

And if none of this works, dance naked in the light of a full moon with copies of the manual soaked in Jack D. burning in a circle at your feet! (Better yet, just drink the Jack then burn the manuals anyway for all the good they do!)

Avid’s response to the things they’ve broken in a new release? “Upgrading to the next release fixes that”. You get to the next release only to find half a dozen new things broken that were working fine before! On top of that, the new release may force you to upgrade to all new servers and workstations to handle the new workarounds you’re going to have to implement!

And no offense to the FCP fanboys, but I’ve heard horror stories from some of my colleagues who work on those systems, too.

There is no perfect piece of software out there. If one is in development, it hasn’t been released yet and when it is it will cost more than the national debt.

But come on: for the amount of money stations and networks pay Avid for this stuff, you’d think they could do better!

Hate Newscutter. Like Media Composer. Your mileage may vary.

[Scott Sheriff]

Phil,
That KB latency would drive me crazy! My FCP is instantaneous. I also have a USB Contour Jogger (I’m old school) and that doesn’t lag either.

I hadn’t stop to consider Start/Restart times until you mentioned that.
Here is what my system does as an example.

Mac Pro 8 core, 2.8 GHz, 16GB 800MHz RAM, System Drive is a 1TB WD Black, 7200 RPM. Running OS 10.6.2 Snow Leopard, and I’m running FCP version 6.0.6. Stand alone system-no network.

Cold Start Up- :46
Running Restart- 1:07
Wake from sleep- :05
Open Final Cut w/6 minute ‘last project’- :26

Worst case scenario I’m looking at under 2 minutes to restart and get back to work. Does it really take the Avid that much longer than this?

[Phil Lowe]

Worst case scenario I’m looking at under 2 minutes to restart and get back to work. Does it really take the Avid that much longer than this?

5 minutes from cold start until ready to edit is about how long it takes, but we’re still running on HP xw-8200s Avid said were still qualified for use with the software we’re on. (Don’t have the version number we’re on in front of me now, but it not the latest).

I run MC 3.1.2 on a Core 2 Duo laptop with 3GB ram (2.0 GHz cpu) and on a Quad Core 2.8 GHz desktop with 8GB ram (64-bit system) and get great results from both. Fast and stable.

I’m just disgusted and frustrated as hell that Newscutter doesn’t work as well, since I have to spend most of my day working on it.

[Maarten Mylemans]

Yep, that seems to be the case, all software seems to have its quirks and downright crippling bugs.

But Phil you seem quite content with Avid Media Composer?

I too have read some horror stories about FCP. Sure, part of those can be because of piloting errors (the people using the software), but not all of those. The biggest gripe seems to be the inconsistency of Apple about what it supports from version to version.

With Adobe you know what they will support, you just know it’ll be in a buggy way (that’s just a joke, although there’s truth in that!).

I just want to minimize post-production stress (out of the normal stress that comes with deadlines). Technical troubleshooting is such a buzzkill! You’re happily working on a scene, everything’s rosy, the actors were great, there’s wonderful continuity, you have all the shots you want and then… your system crashes, and it won’t export, and you get fatal errors… and aaargh.

Maybe I should do what Spielberg does? Stil manually cut with film, at least there won’t be system crashes, and people have developed wonderful workarounds, since they’ve been working with it for about a hundred years now 😀 (just a joke, I don’t think it’s feasible to want to do that anymore)

[Phil Lowe]

But Phil you seem quite content with Avid Media Composer?

Yes. It’s stable and – once you get to know it – fast. I migrated to it when Avid killed Xpress Pro. I had been using that since it was known as Xpress DV starting with version 2, and was a beta tester for Xpress Pro 4.6, still one of the finest versions of the software ever written. That’s because Avid opened it up for public beta, and quite a number of us kicked it around until we broke it, then gave Avid feedback on how to fix it and make it better.

Not sure they do that anymore but, if they aren’t, they should.

Here’s a screen cap of my laptop interface (desktop uses 2 monitors).

But keep in mind, I also use PPro because Avid needs 3rd party software for DVD authoring. I like PPro a lot, too and agree with Tim: if you’re on a less than optimal system any piece of software is going to give you problems.

[Ty Wood]

1 word that hasn’t been mentioned here yet and should have:

Grass Velley’s Edius.

It’s the opposite of riddled with bugs. I find it’s more stable than any other professional editor, including avid and fcp, and it’s also significantly easier to use.

If you’re Premiere-d out and want to stay on PC, I highly recommend checking it out (30 day full featured trial!).