Premiere Pro CS 5.5 versus Final Cut Pro

[Vince Becquiot]

Neil,

The bottom line is, use what you feel most comfortable with.

FCP will likely be a bit more stable since it mostly relies on one format, Prores. I myself ingest a ton a things coming from who knows where, so I love the flexibility of Premiere, even then, I rarely see any crashes.

I also happen to be a fan of After Effects and Cinema 4D, the integration between the 3 is a no brainer for me. But again, I have both platforms, so if a client shows up with a Final Cut project, no problem.

You could look into a Mac pro and get both at some point?

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Neil Myers]

Thank you.

I like PPro, but I haven’t used FCP. That is, however, irrelevant as I am not the person doing the editing anymore — that is left to the people I have hired. I am not writing storyboards and selling.

One thing that seems to be true is that FCP is much faster at encoding H.264. Has that been your experience? I find that complex 1080P projects rendered at the highest settings take about 10 to 15 minutes per minute of runtime. That is much longer than what I have been told is the case with FCP. Has that been your experience?

And … does CS 5.5 running on a muli-CPU XEON machine change that?

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Vince Becquiot]

It’s very difficult to compare rendering time. First, let’s understand that Apple’s H.264 is far from being ranked at the top in terms of quality.

Then you have to take into account what effects are in the timeline and what format you are starting with. Keep in mind that you are not working with Prores native, you’ll have to wait for FCP to ingest and transcode on the front end.

I also believe that most FCP machines you see around are on average better fine tuned that many home build PCs.

In the end, FCP could quite possibly be faster, I have never put renders up for comparison.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m biased, of course, so I’ll keep my response short and just point you to an article about someone who has tried both and made a choice:
https://nycppnews.com/2011/06/09/david-dessel-employs-enjoys-adobe-creative-suite/

If you want more such articles, I’d be happy to post them, but I don’t want to give the hard sell. 😉

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Jon Barrie]

I usually render out to Uncompressed as a Master File which is usually faster to export than to H.264 on its own then use the Master to export to H.264 and watch that sucker encode super fast!

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter

[Erik Lindahl]

I would give this though a say “pause” until Apple has fully revealed it’s intentions with Final Cut Pro X and te rest of their suite. A few direct “ups” of going to MacOS X and Final Cut Pro is one unified format (QuickTime / ProRes) and the avaliablelity of two relatively cheap color correction tools – Apple Color and DaVinci Resolve.

That said, I’d have a hard time seeing me NOT using Adobes production bundle – I just don’t use Premier in it. After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator are more or less a must for my self.

The above is also a question of preferred platform. I know I’ll work faster and be more happy in a OSX environment, I also know people who prefer sitting in Linux or Windows. Everyones tastes are different. In the end though it wouldn’t kill you to have multiple platforms in-house, given it can cause some headaches it can also add jobb-opportunities and keep your workers happier. Alot of post-facilities are mixed platform.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Keith Moreau]

I use both, started on FCP, then last fall decided to try PPro. The reason? Mainly, I realized, that with all the footage I was shooting on DSLR H.264 and AVCHD, which FCP didn’t handle natively, I was going to have to invest in lots of hard drives to store and work with all ProRes transcoded media before even thinking of using it with Final Cut Pro.

So this was the starting point for me, not having to transcode. It was a practical choice. I went through a few growing pains, but actually, PPro’s interface is almost identical to Final Cut Pro’s. I guess they have the same roots, so it was surprisingly quick to transition. Being able to use FCP’s keyboard shortcuts in PPro helped a lot, so I didn’t have to learn a new set of shortcuts.

Now whenever I have to go back to a project that I cut with FCP I’m ready to throw my Mac Pro out the window with frustration. I find it slow, buggy, and unpredictable compared to Premiere Pro. There are still some strange bugs in Premiere Pro CS5 and CS5.5, things I have to work around occasionally, but mostly it’s a lot less buggy and with the right CUDA GPU enabled video cards installed, it’s so much more faster to get to editing than FCP. Many of the common filters are GPU accelerated so rather than having to basically render almost every filter with FCP, I can do a lot of the post production in real time with PPro.

The one kind of slow thing compared to FCP is outputting a encoded file. I agree with a previous poster that it’s best to output to some form of ‘master’ file, that’s close to the sequence settings then do your encodes from that file. In FCP, though you have to render all the time, outputting a master Quicktime file (whatever codec your sequence is set to) is fast. Premiere Pro goes back to the source media to create it’s final output encodes, and this is slower. It’s basically rendering the whole sequence when it outputs. It’s probably higher quality than FCP, but that was a disappointment in PPro and was nearly a disaster on a few early projects because I was expecting FCP speed on the output.

I also find, for some reason, color correction on PPro is less intuitive than FCP, even though they have similar 3-way color correctors, I find PPro’s 3-way is hard to get good results. This might be my lack of knowledge but I found color correcting in FCP much easier to get good results.

Final Cut X may blow away PPro, but I feel that diving into it now is foolhardy. Who knows how buggy it will be or how limited it will be. Maybe it will be awesome and totally replace Premiere. Of course I will immediately buy it for $299 and try it. If it is I may jump back. I just don’t want to transcode stuff and render stuff in the timeline anymore. I want to work, not transcode, render, and use hard drive space unnecessarily.

[Warren Morningstar]

We use both in our operation, although I work exclusively in PPro and import FCP projects if necessary for me to cut on something that was started on the other platform. Not all effects and graphics translate from FCP to PPro, but you get a report of what didn’t come across.

I prefer PPro because of the ability to start cutting immediately on whatever is thrown at me, including the ability to import DVD files without re-wrapping or transcoding.

I also find that I’m much faster than my FCP colleagues, but that may be as much due to experience and editing philosophy as it is to the NLE software.

Ultimately, a good editor will get great results with either. As I say ad naseum, it’s the craftsman, not the tool.

[Phil Hoppes]

Given the recent debacle of FCPX and the fact that you can no longer purchase FCP7 I think the point is quite moot. FCPX is a joke of spectacular proportions. Go check out the FCPX forum or better yet, read Walt Biscardi’s article here on the COW. https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/final-cut-pro-x-whats-missing-for-some-pros

Stick with PP and don’t look back. I will now be following this forum as the wheels have just exploded off the video editing train I use to work with.

[Keith Moreau]

I’m disappointed in the FCP X 1.0 feature set (or shall I say ‘lack of feature set,’ though I’m not surprised. I do think they will be rolling out improvements to replace some of the FCP7 features that are missing and mission critical. I think what we’re seeing is 2-3 years of pent up anticipation from those that live and breath FCP7 and have been waiting for something to fix the bugginess and slowness of FCP7, not change their entire way of editing and workflow that they’ve invested in for perhaps a decade.

I’m not as blindly angry because I personally saw that Apple had a monumental job ahead of them to optimize FCP7, mostly because of it’s reliance on antiquated Quicktime architecture, and that they would be throwing this away. Also because the feature set in FCP7 was immense. Buggy and unstable, but immense and built up over 15 years. It would have been pretty unbelievable if they could release FCP X with all those features. I actually thought there would not be a new FCP release until 2012. In a way I was right, they won’t have a professionally usable replacement for FCP 7, (FCP X v 1.x) until 2012 at least, and that’s if Apple is working toward it vigorously.

I think the biggest mistake is that Apple did not allow an upgrade path for FCP7 projects, and they left out important importing and exporting into some standard format, such as FCP7 XML, and that they left out a very important multiclip feature.

I have heard all these things are coming, but they are not here yet. I do also think that once people can wrap their heads around the new system, they may reconsider FCP X’s usefulness. I may try it for short projects, or for self-contained segments of longer pieces that I incorporate into Premiere Pro. Think of it as a way of producing an After Effects composition that you export as a self contained quicktime file. FCP X is still cheaper than some of the plugins for FCP7 I have, and it probably does much, much more.

People like Larry Jordan and Philip Hodgetts, whom I respect immensely are saying this is a 1.0 release and that it will get better, and I believe them. Just like FCP7 and prior, there will be a whole cottage industry to make up for the deficiencies in FCPX. There will be downward pressure to make those FCP X plugins cheaper, which is good, there will be a much bigger market for FCP X than FCP 7, I think, so those developers will ‘make it up in volume.’

In the meantime, if you want a 64 bit, 21st century version of FCP 7, Premiere Pro is probably a good way to go.