[Mark Onat]

Thank You.

[Mark Onat]

My unused roll of Ampex 456 is gonna look real pretty when I unfurl it in the wind and videotape it….but no, I will not let it blow away into the environment. Hey, let’s not forget Cibachromes – hottest gloss out there. Well, the new metallic inkjets are pretty cool, though.

[Mark Onat]

All they had to do was upgrade iMovie to iMovie Pro and just say the FCP suite wasn’t ready. They’re not a cash-strapped company.
I agree that this is going to make them look weak in general.
Why blatantly misrepresent something? Are they too successful to be burdened by a small customer segment? Does some nutcase think they need to change their identity? Have two years of wild success corrupted the company? IS the consumer side OK with losing the rep of the pro side? Wow, someone just lit one at the party.

Plus the Mac Pro line is overpricing components in its hardware.

The consumer side is the side with the most competition. iPads are pricey compared to 7-inch Androids. Maybe the guys following Steve don’t know what they’re doing after all. Wouldn’t surprise me. Creative people don’t stay in bureaucracies once they make money. Only untalented paperpushers stay in comissariats. Apparently all that talk about Apple being high on itself has turned out to be true.

The ridiculous thing is that amateur filmmakers are just now getting their hands on more pro gear with HD dSLRs and GoPros and moving on up into the ranks of pro creators (mtn bikers, snowboarders, extreme etc). iMovie works for a while, but once you get it, you want to move up. These guys have built FCP as much as anyone. Now Apple’s telling them – don’t buy our software and don’t buy our laptops either. Go back to the PC where things are cheaper and you can customize the software.

I would say its baffling but it actually reminds me of the old days of APPLE, when getting on the internet wasn’t that important.

[Mark Onat]

Thanks for your exact and functional response. Now that I’m up in FCP fully, I’ll be sticking to it for the audio. Your suggestion makes anything that might have to be timed in AE viable.

[Mark Onat]

I demoed After Effects a few times, and decided I liked it quite a bit. i figured I’d buy the Production premium instead of FCP because it included Premiere.

Well, it’s turned out that Premiere CS4 is both lousy for capture, and has a stunted list of transitions and effects, and doesnt export HD QT. Now I find myself back in iMovie, wondering whether to get Final Cut Express or FCP (which has batch export, something great if you want to grind out a bunch of edited clips). Encore has also been a bear, and I dont trust it to burn anything.

So, if you have to choose one or the other, and you’re doing lost of video editing, go with Final Cut Studio. I suppose if you’re doing pro level compositing, then AE is the way to go and it is an efficient elegant program, unlike Premiere, Encore, and Bridge, but I think you can still do 5-10 layer keying and compositing in FCP and do fine, and it comes with plenty of the cool text effects in AE.

of course, if you’re a pro you will own both, or that Nuke software which supposedly is supplanting AE. My point is don’t think that Premiere is a substitute for FCP, because it is not even close (on the mac).

[Mark Onat]

Thanks all for your pointers on how you work with this dumb aspect of AE.

I used the mid resolution settings to do a RAM preview, although I dont understand why it has to grind through this every time instead of just leaving the animation rendered, like in FCP, but ok…0 on the keypad instead of the spacebar to run the audio with the video? Why not the spacebar? That’s what the mute button on the audio track is there for…this makes no sense..depending on how long my edit is, then I have to fiddle with preview settings…there are other programs without this hangup…

I edit my audio in Live, a surprisingly great DAW as well as sample/fiddler, and a program that makes my adobe ware look stodgy.

It’s been just one thing after another with Production CS4…I thought I liked AE, but it figures I didnt notice this until I bought it…

[Mark Onat]

After all the garbage I’ve been dealing with Adobe Premiere CS4 for the mac and Encore, to now find out the AE doesnt even let you edit to sound is just beyond ridiculous. I know AE is a great compositor, because I demoed it a bunch, but FCP will do tons of keying and layering as well.
I’m not saying FCP is AE, but cmon

After Effects is a great program, but to not allow you to match your work to your audio…is this for real? Totally flabbergasted..

whenever I preview the audio, the animation isnt running…

[Mark Onat]

yes, iMovie is clearly a limited program, but it captures from HDV far, far more efficiently than Premiere CS4. Someone in the Adobe forums just confirmed that Premiere does not have access to the part of OSX that does scene autodetect, so Premiere flat out does not have it on the mac. I know purists will capture everything, and then cut, and I crop most every cut eventually, but I really like the auto cuts, and, yes, they are accurate.

You dont really need more than four dissolves, but the fact remains that PPro CS4 has about one third the amount of transitions and effects that the PC version has, and this is also documented, and something Adobe fails to tell people. Also, none of these shortcomings has been addressed in the updates, last one May 09.

I’ve also just discovered that PPro wont export HDV QT. It just doesnt do it, also confirmed on another video site.

iMovie DOES have live onscreen viewing during capture.

Premiere does capture HDV in MPEG2, native format, which is a huge advantage over the mac in terms of storage of raw footage, being about a third or less of the size. Premiere does not crash, and AME works fine, although I’ve heard of people having highly irregular export quality on the mac.

Encore was thoroughly unimpressive. I dont even want to remember all the problems I had in it.
I actually appreciated the customisation possible in it, but it never worked, and every other method of burning DVDs from iDVD to Toast works without any hitch. I guess it could be my three-year old Pioneer DVD burner. Oh no.

These are just impressions, and combined with what Adobe did to the Web Gallery function (moved it to Bridge and destroyed it) I’ve just tired of being in that environment, other than AE and Flash. AE is where I was doing most of my video manipulation anyway, so I’ll be there…

[Mark Onat]

great answers…I knew there had to be reasons beyond the obvious for some of these differences.

[Mark Onat]

thanks for the input… I guess its a tossup between the two until

A. Apple’s standard import puts out smaller files.

B. Premiere for mac offers on-screen capture preview in HDV, scene auto-detect and faster cropping and saving out, because for me, iMovie/FCP have it beat.

Is MPEG-2 really lossless? It seems counterintuitve that it can be original quality and so much smaller. If so, why doesnt mac use it?
(rhetorical question)

I’ll check the animation 100%, but every codec I’ve tried in Apple besides the intermediate codec takes crunching time.

Anyway, thanks