Hello,

I work in a windows environment with premiere...but now I have some people that use premiere under mac, but the have a lot of problems, seems like some bugs in the mac premiere. Now the work some stuff in mac and they handed them to me for render, and seems to have some problems with corrupted files and stuff. My questions are:

1. Are some people finding big bugs in the mac version.
2. Are there really problems with crossing files versions of premiere files between windows and mac.

My colleagues are thinking of switching everything to mac and Final cut, because they say we'll have less problems, but they haven't never used FC, they just like the mac stability better (true mac lovers), but I have my doubts and have more experience in Premiere and windows, never have use FC either and I don't know if its worth the trouble changing everything right now. Some insight will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

If you don`t have any copy of Premiere for Mac yet, you should probably go for Final Cut Studio. It contains FCP, Motion, DVD Studio and Soundtrack, all wrapped up for USD 1300. Premiere alone costs USD 800.

As long as editing is a little more straightforward in Premiere (up to CS3, IMHO), with FCP, you will get professional grade software which is stable, proven with broadcast and film. There are almost no broadcast shows and films edited with Premiere, and for good reasons. It`s just not good for long form stuff, and downright unusable in film (CS4 brings some improvement, but it`s not up to the task yet).

Then again, it all boils down to what you do. For shorter stuff, I tend to like Premiere more. It plays nicely with Adobe stuff and its issues with memory management and general unstability aren`t that likely to pop up.

1) I find bugs on Win and Mac side of Premiere surprisingly similar. I can tell both suffer from a comparable amount of instability (importprocess.exe hanging or crashing, greatly reduced performance of CS4 compared to CS3 on same hardware...)
2) There are several plugins missing in the Mac version (but none of them are dealbreakers) and project files transfer without issues. Beware though, Encore projects aren`t cross-platform.

Hello Jiri,

Thanks for the reply...most of the projects are short in length and some are over an hour, and the most is 3 or 4 hours but I cut in peaces. I also though more professional work was done in Premiere-After effects, examples such as the production company The Basement I think is the name and seem like is doing very professional work. I also know FC is being known for doing pro things most of the time but Adobe is improving along, right?

Thanks again.

After Effects is a completely different story. It`s an indispensable tool for almost everyone from wedding videographers to top Hollywood big budget action movies.

But Premiere is niche, and IMHO, it will always be. It`s not moving in the right direction. I mean, even 80 USD Pinnacle Studio has support for all the AVCHD camcorders, Bluray authoring and whatnot, but that doesn`t good editing app make. For higher penetration in higher-end markets, it needs to be stable and fast, and CS4 is not.