[Erik Lindahl]

Doing primarily medium to high-end TVC’s, the odd music- or corporate video the main systems for editing would be Premiere Pro and AVID. Every so often we get FCPX edits but if I’d have to guess I’d say something like….

70% – Premiere Pro
20% – AVID
10% – FCPX

There is however in general a shocking poor technical understanding through out the industry. But I beilive Premiere Pro has taken over what FCP7 once was.

Internally we use primarily Premiere Pro / After Effects for editing and online-work with Resolve for color grading. We also have a Smoke / Nuke setup but that’s for more pure VFX-work, given a lot is done in PP / AE / Resolve.

That said Premiere Pro has it’s fair of issues. It’s video engine compared to FCPX and Resolve feels aintient in some regards, amazing in others.

[Erik Lindahl]

If you’re aiming for a high-end machine I’d defiantly go with the i7 CPU, top-end GPU, 32 or 64 GB of RAM and a SSD as boot-volume (256 GB should be solid as a start-up volume, 512 GB is more future proof).

The choice of an i7 is a no-brainer for media production. It scales better with more threads and has a healthy boost in clock speeds. If you ever work with heavier formats you will appreciate it. I’d also imagine FCPX’s background renderer likes as many threads / cores as possible. Most encoders scale well with more threads / cores as well.

RAM – defiantly buy from third party.

As for storage something like a Pegasus tends to be great. Some apps like an SSD for their cache but that can be sorted with an external TB3 drive.

[Erik Lindahl]

I think TB-limit on the nMP wasn’t really a choice by Apple, rather a limitation of the given hardware. Think Anandtech had a very good breakdown at release of the machine.

That said I really hope the iMac Pro (and coming MacPro) doesn’t have this limitation to the highest possible way. Apple tends to be pretty good in this area compared to a lot of PC’s. I also beilive the iMac Pro will be based on a yet-to-be-released Xeon with general Core i parity in terms of hardware accelerated features. Or potentially they can achieve similar performance with the new AVX-instructions or through the GPU.

Time will tell for sure!

[Erik Lindahl]

Interesting thing regarding this is that Dell has a 8-core Ryzen + RX580 all-in-one very similar looking to an iMac.

I really hope Apple gets its act back together regarding its hardware.

[Erik Lindahl]

All this is exactly what makes the Adobe eco-system relatively complex. A lot of things are great there but they are far from perfect and do require one to know the ins and outs.

Apples idea of a unified engine in FCPX and Motion is defiantly “the future”. From what I’ve heard Adobe has concidered that route but it’s to big of a task.

[Erik Lindahl]

For example if you project A want to have a setup where you see icons / previews of say 4 different bins where in project B you want a setup with 1 large bin in list view. Every time you swap between the projects the bin-layouts are screwed up. There can also be inconsistencies in the GUI every time you open a project.

Note the above only affects media bins (or is it the project window possibly).

Now in my case I can on a given day work with three – four projects with various requirements and I’ve just given up on anything else but manually organizing everything each time it’s required.

The above could be seen as a detail but it can be very frustrating. I can’t say if FCPX is better or worse in this regard though.

[Erik Lindahl]

Adobe is well aware (or should be) about my concerns yes. I frequently speak to a contact I have there + meet with them every year at IBC.

CPU renders seem reliable from my tests but this makes the application (PP) chocking slow for the most part. It’s also sometimes odd I can render say a 60s sequence in far less time than 60s yet realtime playback often stutters. In this regard FCPX is simply put insane (in a good way).

As with the fact Adobe uses something like 7 (or was it 17) different type-engines in their apps I’m not surprised things like vector-rasterizing differs between apps. It’s however frustrating one can’t assume “Adobe Creative Cloud” as “one” set of tools, each app has it’s own quirks. This includes simple things such as format / codec support.

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s true you can layout the Premeire GUI to your liking true but it still looks pretty poor compared to FCPX and Resolve. Sort of like it’s a mish-mash of 5 different apps. The GUI also suffers deeply from amnesia. In project A I want one layout, in project B a different one. It’s manual setup every time more or less (the project / bin setup windows primarily).

In terms of the Premiere graphics engine being sub-par really comes down to quality. After Effects gives better, more predictable results compared to Premiere hence I’m still forced jumping hoops between the apps. You can / have to work around it or live with lesser quality. Different plugins that do seemingly the same thing will render vastly different results. This can be true in any app of course, just point out “the grass isn’t always greener”.

For graphics and titles I always go Illustrator / Photoshop > After Effects > Premiere or just create them in AE. You can get around the quality issue by super sampling your graphics files in Illustrator but even then you loose all realtime in PP so the upside is a bit questionable (and techicanlly PP can still screw with the image). Also, if you have 10-20 text items the client wants new fonts and drop shadows for this is a pain to deal with in PP vs AE (2017 version might have changed that, I haven’t tested that version yet).

Premiere is also quite confused where some parameters are in % where others are in pixels.

I can post some screen-grabs tomorrow perhaps.

[Erik Lindahl]

Isn’t it more like going to the hospital and the doctor just removes your organs with out asking…? 🙂

[Erik Lindahl]

A lot of GPU accelerated issues with basics such as transforms and crops can render sub-par quality.

You also have the default linear light mode which renders everything wrong. This can be manually disabled but it’s a hassle to remember. Then you have things you think might render the same in AE and PP but they won’t. Effects will appear different even with identical settings. There are also a ton of cache-related bugs where PP will “remember” precious states of media or effects. Rendering will also act differently with or with out GPU acceleration and can look different in realtime playback vs final render.

Also, as mentioned, anything dealing with rastering (vector to pixel graphics) will in general look like garbage in PP compared to AE or PS. Color transformations is also handled vastly different depending on the app you’re using.