Premiere Pro CS 5.5 versus Final Cut Pro

[Chase Smith]

Good point, I don’t like the polarizing issue of Microsoft vs Apple either. As someone who has used both products extensively, I prefer Adobe Premiere Pro.

So I don’t use the products for professional use but I do like to get as much functionality out of the products as possible – especially if I’m paying a decent amount of money for them. I really like the functionality Premiere Pro offers. Their playback feature is also really great, much better than FCP. (Here’s a short but useful comparison on the playbacks of both platforms – https://getcomparisons.com/final-cut-pro-x-vs-adobe-premiere-pro#review-4661 ). One of the main reasons I loved Premiere though was after you get over the initial hump of learning the product, it’s functionality reveals itself because it’s a very intuitive product.

[Gabriel Spaulding]

I am a Final Cut Pro X user who has been learning how to work with Premiere Pro CS5.5. I was used to taking the time to transcode my AVCHD files to ProRes so I could work with them in FCP X, but was curious to see how well Premiere Pro would play with them, considering all the hype about not having to transcode media. They barely play at all, that is, without rendering. And after some real testing I found that it took MUCH less time to transcode the files to ProRes for FCP X than it did for them to render in the Premiere Pro timeline. I think it’s odd that I have to render anything in the timeline just to be able to play it, as no changes have been made to the original media, i.e. no effects applied. It would be nice if reviews were more forthcoming about the fact that in Premiere Pro, ‘not transcoding often requires rendering’, which is a considerable amount of time to wait before one starts working.

[Vince Becquiot]

You should absolutely have no issue playing AVCHD without rendering in Premiere.

If you do, there likely is a bottleneck in your system, most likely the graphics card.

It will definitely not play on integrated cards. If you list your system specs, we can try to figure out where the issue is.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Gabriel Spaulding]

I have a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 iMac with 16GB of RAM and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512MB of VRAM. I know I am not getting the full functionality of Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine because I don’t have a Nvidia card, but with 4 cores on my machine and 16GB of RAM, I am able to do some very complex animations in Motion and After Effects, so one would think I could play a simple AVCHD file. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what Premiere has to offer (except the appearance of both clips and waveforms in the timeline –very difficult to read accurately and quite ugly, unlike Final Cut Pro X). I am just (unfortunately) stuck working with AVCHD for the time being, and find it frustrating that I have to render the clips just to play them.