Your advice on choosing between Premiere Pro and Final Cut please

[Carly Smith]

I’m going to chime in because we hire those right out of school graduates, being a small company.

I can’t tell you the number of nasty emails we get when we specify Adobe-only. Lots of “get a life, you must be old, you don’t know anything about production” (and obviously those applicants go in the trash)
I had a kid argue with me *in the interview* that FCP was industry standard, and he had no job experience, it was just that his teacher told him that, so he accepted it as gospel.

Adobe for us is preferred because we have always been a PC shop. Thats it. We sold off our old AVID system and moved to APP, and outside of a recent snafu involving Quick Time, we have been pretty happy.

We keep one Mac in the studio to run Pro Tools for audio.

I’ll take an editor who can setup a multi-camera workflow and knows some strong After Effects. I want to hire the person who loves to edit, and who would go home and research the answer to an issue and bring it in the next morning.

My point is that any student with a strong demo that shows a range of skills and isn’t one long scene from his buddys indie film ALWAYS gets an interview around here.

ok, end of babble.

[Tim Kolb]

I think you’ve gotten it pretty much like it is…

A school has the responsibility to teach students skills they can use…so I suppose that needs to be front and center. What is more likely to get a student a job?

The world does seem pretty focused on FCP at the moment. I’ve done some pretty long form stuff in PPro (2 hours…3 hours…), so that’s a bit of a myth. There have been some odd issues over the last several versions with some large footprint project files, but I’ve found that to be based on factors other than sheer length of timeline or number of assets.

Premiere has had timeline markers since a version that I can’t even recall…FCP just got them. It’s all in what you need and what you’re used to…and no app is flawless.

I would say that adding Adobe with an updated FCP would likely be a better route than switching from FCP altogether… I’m an Adobe user and I use FCP very little, but the current trends are self-evident.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,