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The Showdown: FCPX vs Premiere Pro Full 45 minute presentation
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This is even more funny considering the source code for DNxHD is freely available, provided by Avid.
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[Shane Ross] “ProRes? Encoder not free, and you cannot encode to it on a PC, period. “
You may want to change the finality of “period.”
Telestream Episode Engine can encode to ProRes on Windows. Not cheap but for bigger facilities that can afford the $4k for an enterprise encoder, it can be done.
[Shane Ross] “And yes….$300 for students with 4 years of upgrades free. And it is a TV/Film industry standard. “
True but there may be other considerations he didn’t verbalize. Once the student graduates, unless there’s an upgrade path to the full version, is $2500. That’s a steep cost for a student who may well be buried in Tuition debt. With Adobe CS there’s an affordable subscription model and there’s the low cost of FCPX.
As for the TV/Film industry standard, it’s great aspiration for a student for a small competitive niche with having to work through internships and assistant editor positions but for many it’s only slightly better than a lottery ticket. With Adobe or FCPX, one can be “self employed” at a lower price and aim for the corporate market which now also includes an expending video for web marketing opportunities.
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Owning editing software is a luxury. When working in broadcast TV or film, 95% of the time you will be using equipment at the production company, or post house. VERY rarely do editors get to edit on their own gear out here. Most don’t own their own stuff. Only if we have side projects or a job that will pay for it will we get it. Which is why FCP flew off the shelf and took over, we bought it to do our side work on.
So…for side work, sure, FCX. But if they want to work in TV/film, they need to learn the Avid. If they leave the school with only FCX training…they’ll be hard pressed to find a job.
Most often right out of school students don’t hit the ground editing. They start at other companies doing lower end work and working their way up. So they use the software and tools those companies use.
Ownership of editing software, and editing right out of college, is rare. Yes, it happens, but it is rare.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Sadly, unlike Joseph Owens and Michael Hendrix, I was forced to watch the whole thing. You have got to be kidding me. And to echo Shane Ross: “students are not good at organizing”? I will go way further than Shane and say that editing is organization. It is 90% organization and 10% art. If you need a crutch for organization in any discipline you are screwed. I give the edge to people thinking for themselves and their own needs and not paying the slightest attention to those who do not have to deliver programming in the real world. Forty-five minutes of my life taken that were wholly useless and that I will never get back. Can you bill someone for that?
Tim
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With the academic version of Avid Media Composer, after you graduate, it becomes a full commercial license. Note that this deal is also good for teachers.
[Shane Ross] “But if they want to work in TV/film, they need to learn the Avid.”
Which is what makes the $399 Media Composer deal such a no-brainer.
The myth of “no ProRes on a PC” really does need to die. In addition to Episode, Telestream Vantage and FlipFactory all encode to ProRes on Windows. Harmonic Rhozet ProCoder (formerly Canopus, then Grass Valley) integrates straight into Premiere, so you can encode ProRes on Windows directly from the timeline.
Slight catch: you have to be using a server version of Windows, which CS6 doesn’t technically support, but I’ve seen many reports of it working in grand fashion. Of course, you can also run the server version of the OS on a render machine or garden…no different than thousands of you are already doing with render stations/gardens/farms already.
These can scale up to enterprise-class infrastructures of course, but you can also use the free 5DtoRBG, which puts a nice interface on top of FFmpeg, which is not only free but open source.
Note that FFmpeg is not exactly pretty for non-nerds. Lots of command line. It’s also limited to 1 file at a time. However, downloading “Another GUI” (that’s the name of the free software) as the front end is pretty slick, and supports batching.
These are all a lot simpler than I’m making them sound LOL, but there really are quite a few very good options for encoding ProRes on Windows, from massive server-based batch encoding, all the way down to single-file DSLR exports, and several stops in-between.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
OK, good to be schooled about ProRes.
Still makes me wonder what he meant by “Proprietary nature of Avid.” Guessing the MXF files?
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Craig Seeman] “Telestream Episode Engine can encode to ProRes on Windows. Not cheap but for bigger facilities that can afford the $4k for an enterprise encoder, it can be done.”
5DtoRGB can do it on Windows…for free. Though, admittedly, only one file at a time.
EDIT: Tim beat me to it.
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[Shane Ross] “Most often right out of school students don’t hit the ground editing. They start at other companies doing lower end work and working their way up. So they use the software and tools those companies use.”
This would appear to infer that ‘learning to edit’ with FCX would be an even bigger waste of time (since it does all the organizational legwork for you) so that would be a non-acquired experience, and no matter what cataloguing model a production company bases its server-sharing around, its going to be a cold start for anyone entering the environment.
I liken it to moving into a new house. The dang light switches are in different places everywhere! I especially hate it when the bathroom switch is outside the room. But FCX doesn’t even have light switches, it is so simple and helpful — but you only get illumination when Apple decides you need it and they feel like flipping the switch.
Does anyone (else) here remember SCTV’s Ed Grimley (Martin Short) , who never learned how to climb a staircase?
Apple: why bother? anywhere we’d go has escalators. As If.jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Gary Huff] “5DtoRGB can do it on Windows…for free. Though, admittedly, only one file at a time.
EDIT: Tim beat me to it.”
🙂
And, “Another GUI” (that’s the name of the free software) is a free downloadable front end for ffmpeg (the same free software underneath 5DtoRGB) that’s quite nice, and supports batching.
Sorry to be repetitious, but I think this is pretty cool stuff.
tw
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I bought Production Premium CS4 and CS5 while I was studying. The student version is about 400 euros, you get a lot of applications for the price, you can use them in commercial productions and can install them to two computers. The license doesn’t go anywhere and you can upgrade it to a retail box at the same upgrade price.
It’s cheap as hell considering Photoshop CS6 Extended alone is about 1000 euros.
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