Premiere Pro on Mac vs FCP?

[Walter Biscardi]

Have you done a search on this forum for Premiere Pro and/or PPro? There was a long discussion about this a few months ago.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Ahhhh…cheers Walter. Should’ve looked first!

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Itamar Kool]

Partcularly look at which videocard on the Mac is ready for Premiere Pro. I for one have been waiting for a half year now for a driver for my Kona LHe and I still don’t know when it will be there

Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl

[Jimmy Brunger]

I’ll be going for a BMD HD Extreme, so hopefully that’ll work?

I’ve searched archives but I can’t really find anything about whether FCP makes better use of the multicores, GPU, specific integrated mac hardware, etc than Premiere. I know something about Apple RT effects that are native, but is there anything performance wise that FCP has over PPro?

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Itamar Kool]

If they say it works, I guess it does. You should make sure though. I also bought the whole Production Premium package hoping that it would make life easier since I also do a lot of After Effects stuff. But I wont’t touch Premiere Pro until I get a driver for my Kona that does work with it. I did hear that Premiere is still a bit flaky on the Mac, but I just don’t know.
As to making use of the multicore: After Effects does that quite well; even better then the Apple applications, I think; so maybe Premiere does a good job at it as well.

Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl

[Jimmy Brunger]

I know it’s early days for Premiere, but I’m getting the full suite anyway, so we’ll see I guess. If PPro is totally unusable then I guess I’ll dive in for FCS nearer the time.

If anyone else has any experiences of PPro on Mac then please do share…

Thanks.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Sean Oneil]

I’ve used it on a PC. There’s nothing wrong with it at all. The problem is selling yourself to clients. “Adobe Premiere” has been known as THE cheesy amateur-hour video editing program for the better part of 15 years. While that’s no longer the case (maybe it never was) I’d still have a hard time asking certain clients for $xxx per hour and they sit down and see Adobe Premiere.

FCP suffers from the same problem but not nearly the same extent that Premiere does. FCP still doesn’t sound as glamorous as Avid or Combustion. But it’s rep is always improving and more and more people realize it’s just as powerful. I think the existence of Final Cut Express has helped a lot.

Unfortunately most clients are not technical at all. Some just see these things in terms of Ford, BMW, and Ferrari, etc. Some might see Premiere as a Hyundai while they see Final Cut as an Acura.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hmm..true to an extent, but to be honest my clients aren’t really going to be bothered. They’re paying for my time and as long as I provide a good service for the money and an upto date machine that’s quick enough to get the work done on budget then they’ll be happy.

I mean – I work mostly in Adobe apps these days, apart from Mocha and the odd jaunt into Elastic Reality and Combustion and my clients are constantly amazed with what I can come up with (albeit on a very out of date PC, which is the main bottleneck in my workflow!) and not phased by the ‘it’s only a PC’ stigma. I worked on a Quantel Paintbox Express for 2 years when I started at our facility – something that cost 6 figures to buy in it’s day – and that piece of carp sums up to about a tenth of what I can do with Photoshop alone! I think my clients have realised the value of that.

Your showreel should speak for itself, but I agree..sometimes are only drawn by the shininess of your sports car! 😉 Silly really.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Connor Roberts]

NO NO NO NO NO!

I am a 10yr Premiere Pro user, and the new CS3 is HORRIBLY slow on MacOS. It is not nearly as quick and responsive as CS3 on Windows, and crashes doing basic things that never happens on Windows. this may be a limitation of MacOS and how it handles memory worse than XP, or could be the fact that CS3 is new to Mac (vastly different than old Mac versions) so it is basically all new programming.

Trust me, or don’t trust me – just use Premiere Pro on Mac for a day…you will hate it. I edit with Premiere Pro every day on PC/XP and NEVER have issues; my workflow is like lightning. I tried the same set up on Mac (Premiere Pro CS3 and Encore CS3)….no dice man. It ran slow, crashed on simple tasks like audio fades and stuff like that.

If you are on MacOS use FCP, If you are on Windows use Premiere Pro. Contrary to popular belief, they BOTH are just as powerful as one another now, and the only reason studios use FCP over Premiere Pro is because in the 90’s, Premiere Pro was far behind. Now, in many ways, it’s technology is far ahead, and the interface is identical. Just go to Google images and look up FCP Screenshots, and Premiere Pro screenshots…there is all this talk about how one is better than the other, and the people who say that are the ones who have never used anything but ONE of the programs. They both do the same thing, and they both do it just as powerfully…all have same native transitions, effects, color correction, export features, etc…

BY THE WAY: I have one of the newer Intel iMacs 24″, 2.8ghz intel core2duo, 4gb ram, and I run Windows XP on it with PPCS3, and it runs SOOOO fast. So I would recomment installing bootcamp, and make a 100GB partition with with Windows XP and CS3 installed, then install CS3 on Mac partition also, and try it yourself…everything I have said in this post will make sens when you do.

::: Connor

[Walter Biscardi]

[Connor Roberts] “BY THE WAY: I have one of the newer Intel iMacs 24″, 2.8ghz intel core2duo, 4gb ram”

An iMac is not going to be able to mix formats in the same timeline in realtime. Maybe a few small formats, but probably not. You will require a fast G5 or MacPro for this to happen.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow!

Read my Blog!