The Showdown: FCPX vs Premiere Pro Full 45 minute presentation

[Chris Jacek]

Ric,

Kudos to you for having the guts to address this tough crowd. There are many strong opinions and harsh criticisms that come from this group, and I am just as guilty as anyone. Thanks for keeping a good debate going. That said, I’m sorry to set up the big “BUT”, but…

I have to disagree with you regarding FCPX even being the best tool for video art. I run a Digital Media program at a small college. We emphasize both employability, and artistic video creation. One of our major annual projects is something called the “Big Box” where we create a four-sided video “room” that people stand inside of, and are surrounded by video on all 4 sides, similar to the parlors in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. To make this work, we must create a master video in an obscure frame size (4096×768). Unless things have changed dramatically since I gave up on the software, this is not even possible in the FCPX environment.

Though FCPX and Motion are indeed capable of compelling visuals, they are also quite often limited to a “preset” mentality. Yes, you can create some lush animations, but there are likely 10,000 other people making the exact same visual. For truly original work, I believe that After Effects is far better suited to the task. I could not even imagine attempting some of the things we have tried without the use of the expressions language in After Effects. And of course, Premiere benefits from offering the easiest pipeline to After Effects.

As an educator, I do feel that I must echo some of the sentiments of other professionals on the board. It should not be the goal of instructors to find the easiest path for our students, nor should we cater to their deficiencies, such as their lack of organizational skills. That would be like assigning less homework, because students have a tendency not to do their homework. Or starting class late, because students are notoriously bad at getting up early. We owe it to them to help overcome their deficiencies.

We use DSLRs. in part, for this very reason. DSLRs’ lack of adequate autofocus, quality sync-sound, power-zoom, and other features that have become standard on video cameras, is actually a benefit to teaching, rather than a liability. It allows me to teach the students the skills that many of us may have let slip over the past 10-20 years. And by doing so, the students are able to create a much better product than they would have been able at the same price point (because, in education it’s also ALWAYS about budget).

Okay, now I am straying wildly off-topic, which is starting to sound like one of my classes.

Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee

[Ric Lanciotti]

Thanks everyone,

No hard feelings at all. I actually had very similar arguments about professional employment for our students when I fist saw the outline for the program. It was kind of surreal seeing the same arguments I had made to the chair coming back at me. But, I take full responsibility for misrepresenting some things as industry standard and I’ll definitely do a little more due diligence in the future, thanks for the lesson guys.

Chris, I completely agree with almost everything you’ve said, After Effects is the right choice for that type of work and it is the program we teach or show students when they need that level of sophistication in their projects. I’m actually happy that FCPX’s effects are so template based as it makes it really easy for me to use most of my student’s “I’m an artist and therefore different than everyone else” mentality to push them towards the proper tool – After Effects (Although the FCPX > AE workflow leaves a lot to be desired). I will say I just recently began introducing my students to FCPX and it was great to see so many of them beginning to understand sequencing and timing rather than being frustrated with timecode errors etc.

Thanks again for everyone’s responses.