fcp user-still on the fence-adobe suite yeh/ney?

[Rob Katz]

i am a producer who often does the first and even second level edits in fcp and then brings ithe cut to my "regular' editors to finish these longer form projects.

the short pieces i cut myself in fcp.

i'm a decent editor. i'm a better producer/director/writer/cameraperson because i've done all of those skills over a much longer length of time.

i want/need to continue to grow my edit skills.

i deal w/sd footage-dvx100m .mov files, p2 files, avchd files, and will soon be employing the canon 7d so i believe spews out h264 files.

i work on a mac platform with a 2008 mac pro 8 core 2.8 w/12gig ram.

as to the query:

i have been reading up on the adobe switcher promo and apple's lack of growth in the fcp platform-fcp x might be considered a step back- and wonder if adobe would work for me.

easy learning curve?

do i have to swap graphic cards -xt8800- to a cuda card to fully employ premiere?

what other programs do you love/tolerate/dislike in the full promo production suite?

anyone think the adobe promo will be extended beyond september 30th?

thanks in advance to those who care to share.

be well

rob
smalltalk productions

[Marcus Durham]

The promo now ends the 31st of October.

Switching is fairly trouble free. Remember FCP and Premiere are distant cousins anyway.

You can run side by side no issues at all. I'm using both. FCP for ongoing older projects, Premiere for new stuff.

[Rob Katz]

marcus-

can you please provide a link that the promo has been extended to october 31st for those of us in the united states?

thanks in advance for sharing in the conversation.

be well

rob
smalltalk productions

[Andy Wilkinson]

See the Adobe Terms & Conditions link in Post 36 within this thread

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...ml#post1685089

[Matt Portwood]

Rob,

I faced this same question much like you. I did shell out the cash and gave FCP X a good run for a couple of months. It has some very nice features and I like the direction that it is headed in, but in its current iteration I am afraid it will be quite some time before we see it evolve to the point that it is as versatile and usable in the professional realm as FCP 7 or Premiere Pro.

After trying it out for a couple of months I finally decided to make the switch to Premiere and I must say it has been a surprisingly smooth transition. They are so very similar in many ways. It takes only a short time to learn the slight differences in the interfaces of the different applications in the suite, but all in all it feels like home compared to FCP 7.

I would recommend downloading the 30 day Production Premium trial and get a feel for it before you make your purchase. That is what I did and so far I am glad that I did.

I do not have a compatible graphics card for taking advantage of the GPU acceleration of the Mercury Engine, but none the less Premiere runs just fine on my iMac with only 8/gigs of RAM. So I think you should be just fine on your current setup and swapping the cards would just be icing on the cake.

Hope this helps!

[Dan Speicher]

Matt,

or anyone else for that matter...

Im running a 3.4ghz quad core imac with 8gigs of ram, and premiere pro 5.5 seems to give me the beach ball from hell fairly often. Im a new user, being a photographer moving into video, but premiere seems much easier for ME to figure out than fcp. Im using a sony NX5U so AVCHD should be handled fine... are you experiencing any real issues? How are you setting your imac up with scratch disks? will upgrading my video card to 2G of RAM help (since its not CUDA compatible)? any suggestions would be great...

Thanks

Dan

[Chris Duczynski]

Rob, I use both as well but PPro does titling way way better. The dynamic links between PS and AE are great as is the Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) which gives you FAST performance even when using different native formats on the one timeline. Lots of stuff that once you switch all makes sense.

[Bart Walczak]

Dan,

Beachball usually happens when you switch from Premiere to another application and back. On regaining focus Premiere looks if all your media files are still in place. The more files (and it's the number that counts, not GBs), and the slower the HDD, the more time it takes to switch back and start working again.

Good for productivity - makes me think twice before doing anything else than editing - but annoying when you want to do something quickly.

[Bill Pryor]

I switched and have edited several programs in PP now. Some things it's way batter at, some things now as good. There are some things you need to learn about audio so you don't go nuts, and little things like activating tracks (you don't just move the V or A up to link a track, you also have to click on the part to the right and turn it light gray as well). The titling alone makes it worth the switch, and the Warp Stabilizer in AE is fantastic.

One thing that's irritating, though, is that the snap to function only works when you're dragging a clip up to another clip. Just moving the cursor, it doesn't snap into place. So there are a few little wrinkles like that. Hopefully they'll improve soon. Another is that the sound controls only control the entire track. You want to adjust a clip, you have to do it on the clip itself, rather than pulling a slider--that's a real hassle. Overall, though, it works a lot better on my 8 core Mac than FCP does. Oh yeah, you can do Blu-ray authoring as well (using an external Blu-ray burner of course).

What we really need is a book like that book a few years ago "FCP for Avid Editors." There's a book out there but it's not organized in a way that lets you find things easily. The FCP-Avid book was great. You could look up commands at the end of each chapter, or find what you needed in the index and it would tell you exactly how to do it.

Some of the things that make me like PP better than FCP are titling, Blu-ray authoring, no need to render things like chroma key to see what they look like because of real realtime playback, the easy full screen playback, the speed of everything, Warp Stabilizer, no need to transcode from 5DII original, and a number of other things I can't think of right now. Overall the plusses more than make up for the minuses, and most of the minuses involve audio.