Premiere Pro or FCP — which is more stable?

[Vince Becquiot]

The Mac will tend to be more stable on average because you are restricted to select hardware. You should however get the same stability in Premiere if you follow Adobe’ s guide to recommended hardware.

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/dvhdwrdb.html

Premiere also supports many more codecs, and most without indexing / conforming, so again, unless you are editing pro formats, DV, DVCPro, XD CAM, you are bound to get less stability.

But to be sure, they both will crash on you at some point 🙂

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Chris Davis]

Thanks. By instability, I also mean to refer to glitches like unusually long render times, file corruption, etc.

[Eric Jurgenson]

This won’t answer your question, because I’m on a PC. But I recently upgraded my system from CS3 on XP to CS4 on 64-bit Vista, and upped my RAM to 8 GB.

On CS3, Premiere would choke on large HD projects – low memory issues. Now on CS4, everything is working like a dream, even on large HD projects, and with multiple apps open. I don’t think I’ve had a crash since the upgrade. Certainly, Premiere’s native file handling is a real time saver, and I’m getting better than 90% utilization on all four cores of my single quad core processor when rendering and exporting.

The real surprise is that I’m liking Vista. After you disable all the c**p Microsoft put in to protect us, it is turning into a pretty sweet OS.

[Chris Davis]

“This won’t answer your question, because I’m on a PC…”

Thanks. Although I’m primarily looking for Mac to Mac comparisons, I’m not sure how many people have used PPro CS4 on a Mac. I’m also interested in the experiences of people using PPro CS4 on a PC, so long as it’s with a 64 bit OS and at least 8GB of RAM.

[Troy Murison]

Hi Chris,

I haven’t used CS4 on the Mac yet. Still waiting on CS4 drivers for my SDI card. But comparing CS3.x and FCP 6.0.x, hands-down on my particular system, FCP is FAR more stable. I have had lots of hiccups w/PPro CS3 including ‘dropped frames’ warnings so recurrent and bad I can’t play back any footage (this is SD footage captured w/PPro on a system that is capable and does play back 2+ streams of 1080 30p HD footage in real time in FCP) to random crashes on scrubbing the timeline, rendering the timeline, importing/conforming footage or audio, etc. It’s so bad that I never took the time to troubleshoot much because I have too much work to get done to be farting around with it. I have reinstalled the OS and the entire Adobe and FCP suites twice due to other issues and the problems with PPro persist.

So I use FCP and Avid instead. I’d like to use PPro more ’cause I work a ton in AE. So Automatic Duck is my friend. And yes, FCP crashes occasionally and has it’s own quirks and irritations, but overall has been very stable for me. As an aside, I can’t remember the last crash I had on Avid (MC 2.8, 3.0).

I do run CS4 on a PC occasionally and the results are MUCH better, though I have to admit FCP is still less prone to crash for me (not a apples to apples comparison though- no pun intended!). I can’t complain about PPro with regards to crashing on a PC though. It’s been pretty good for me. So there may be something just plain wrong with my Mac and PPro. There are just too many other shortcomings in PPro for my particular workflow to make it worth my while to troubleshoot, even with the integration with AE.

FWIW, I’m still running Tiger 10.4.11 and latest BM drivers for Decklink HD card on a 8 core Intel with 16GB RAM. Everything else Adobe seems to run fine on it so who knows….

Good luck,

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Tim Kolb]

[Troy Murison] “There are just too many other shortcomings in PPro for my particular workflow to make it worth my while to troubleshoot, even with the integration with AE.”

I think this is really a key point. I think different workflows produce different results as far as render times, file handling, etc.

I’ve found FCP and PPro -CS3- to be fairly equivalent user experience on a Mac Book Pro..obviously a relatively limited system and no added hardware cards, and each has workflows where one surpasses the other.

Once a hardware card is added to a system…BlackMagic, AJA, etc, the card drivers do play a role.

Adobe products will typically run FAR better with more RAM. Bottom line is that 8 GB is probably minimum on a workstation. I run CS4 on my Dell laptop (M90 Precision) with WXP and a beefy display card and only 2 GB or RAM with few issues other than I can’t do much dynamic linking…

I think it’s a good idea to check around for people’s experiences, but I’d also check Adobe’s website for any system recommendations on the Mac side.

I would suspect in the end that since FCP only edits QuickTime, it’s probably, technically more stable. Adobe accepts nearly anything on the timeline and cuts it. It’s hard to claim that all video file types and wrappers including QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, WMV, H.264, MXF, MP4 (including native support for MXF P2, XDcam, HDV, etc), and all the still formats that it accepts including layered PSDs, are handled with equal silky-smoothness in Adobe when so many users have a myriad of other software running on their systems (PC or Mac) that can conflict with pro video apps.

So, maybe if FCP has your workflow down…FCP is the best choice for cutting, but since you’ll probably have Production Premium on your system anyway for all the other apps, I’d be curious how CS4 runs without Final Cut Suite (or any other editor) installed on the machine?

I doubt you’ll come up with a really straight answer on this issue as Adobe has done far less to restrict their workflows than Apple has, and when you eliminate all capabilities that you don’t do really well, it means that everything left should work great.

(I’m not offering that so much as a criticism BTW as some days I truly lament the bloated nature of all our tools -no matter what brand…)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

[Vince Becquiot] “Premiere also supports many more codecs, and most without indexing / conforming, so again, unless you are editing pro formats, DV, DVCPro, XD CAM, you are bound to get less stability.”
[Eric Jurgenson] “On CS3, Premiere would choke on large HD projects – low memory issues. Now on CS4, everything is working like a dream…”
[Tim Kolb] “I would suspect in the end that since FCP only edits QuickTime, it’s probably, technically more stable… Adobe has done far less to restrict their workflows than Apple has, and when you eliminate all capabilities that you don’t do really well, it means that everything left should work great.”

Looks like people here are for the most part saying PPro CS4 has gotten fairly stable when used on a proper setup, largely due to its to access enough RAM. I’m also hearing that, although it may not be as stable as FCP, this is due largely to workflow restrictions on FCP.

Thanks to all who posted so far, and I will still be watching this thread.
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Does Leopard take advantage of over four GB of RAM on a CS4 PPro?

I thought it did, but am hearing otherwise on another forum. This would explain why I read on one post that PPro tends to run better on Vista than a Mac. (I am assuming that PPro does best on 8 plus GB of RAM).

https://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211200998
“Jabberwolf is right – although OSX is a 64-bit OS, CS4 will run 32-bit on OSX, but 64-bit Vista can run a 64-bit CS4.

Don’t remember the specifics, but it had something to do with Apple pulling 64-bit support from Carbon after promising to leave it in. Adobe should have switched to Cocoa long ago though …”

Thanks,
Chris