I'm looking for an editing program that's similar to Premiere 6.0/6.5/Pro. Now the thing is that I like PRemiere Pro, however my colleauge refuses to work with it and says if we end up purchasing an Adobe product to use for our editing purposes we'll be buying Premiere 6.5.

The only other progam I've found that even appears to edit in the same way as Premiere is Final Cut. But here are the pro's and cons of each thing why I don't want to use them:

Avid DV/Pro
Pro: GREAT System, it has to be good if they edit movies on it!!

Cons: Completely different style of cutting and editing into one final project - Can only use on one computer at a time with the USB Key.


Vegas Video:
Pros: Comes with DVD Software, I hear its stable

Cons: Different style of editing also...I can't seem to figure it our any more than I can Avid.


Final Cut Pro:
Pros: I'd go with it in a heartbeat if it was on PC...but since its not its stable and it has a very similar style to Premiere, probably with more features and effects on it also

Cons: Expensive system to setup. I don't own a mac to play around with it for awhile like I have for Avid and Vegas...so if we went Mac it would cost more and we're stuck with it!!

Premiere:
Pros: I know how everythign works on it...I like it
Cons: Not as stable...especially with versions before Pro and there's no way I can get my partner to use Pro (don't know why but he's tried it and says he won't).



Now...I don't really feel like learning a whole new setup for editing. I like the way Premiere has done it and I've heard before that it either works for you or it doesn't...there's not really an inbetween, and that's exactly the point I'm at right now.

Can anybody give me any compelling reasons to turn one way or another? If I could find a video tutorial on how to perform simple edits maybe I could start leaning towards Vegas or Avid...however I can't so I've just ruled those two out. Any suggestions, comments would be greatly appreciated!

Tim

Get a new partner and stay with Premiere!!!!

Have you looked at Pinnacle Liquid Edition. Again, it's a different style of editing but it's a good app and pretty stable. Ulead havae Media Studio Pro but it's more of a consumer product. If you were to purchase a Canopus DV card like the Storm2 you'd also have Edius which is Canopus's own NLE and reportably quite good. With the Canopus card you coulld also have Premiere there if you wanted to cut something with it.

What would something like a Canopus DV Card help me with? Is it just like a piece of hardware that will speed up the rendering and program for editing DV itself? I'd really just rather stick with Premiere Pro, but I've tried and tried to get my partner to switch...his only reasons are its unstable, everthing he tries to do crashes on him.

Final Cut is unstable for some folks too, and it isn't stable without patches. Premiere Pro crashes pretty quickly on my computer doing basic stuff. Vegas may have crashed once on my system (it stopped responding, I didn't wait and closed it down by accident). Most Vegas users don't get any crashes with it- you'll be hard pressed to find frustrated users on Vegas forums as opposed to Adobe and FCP forums.

Premiere 6.5 is very frustrating.

I don't know... choose the NLE that fits you the best. A lot of them have demos. To figure out Vegas, go print out the shortcut keys list stickied in the Vegas forum. FCP is similar to Premiere, but it can still be unstable and Macs are kinda expensive.

I can understand why some people don't like Premiere, but I can't for the life of me understand how someone could prefer 6.5 over Pro.

I've been with Premiere since 4.1 (I think) and Pro has been the single greatest version jump I've ever seen in this line. It's really heads above what they've done in the past.

Mostly because it's a lot more like FCP now. ;)

I'm sticking with Premiere for the time being because of Adobe Encore. There's not a huge level of integration between Encore and Premiere that's of value, but I love Encore and it's just easy to stick with the Adobe suite.

I'm seriously considering an Avid workstation for the next upgrade.

Yeah, I love Premiere Pro over 6.5, but he thinks its unstable. I did think it was just the comptuer he was using but then we formatted and he "claims" it still crashed, however Premiere Pro has been very reliable and user friendly for me.

I guess its just I like dragging all the clips I need down tot he timeline and cutting and moving from there. Even if it's not the most efficient way of doing it compared to maybe Avid, its the easiest for me to see and place the clips in my head and see where I want them to go. At this point I think I'd only go with Avid for the effects it has. I'll see what I can dig up in terms of more tutorials for these other programs to see if I can learn to like them, but I just can't get myself to part from Premiere Pro, even if its not the most stable out of all of them, I haven't had major problems with it.

BTW, one other question. In terms of rendering out files to Mpeg2(DVD), is there any one program that is faster than other? I heard Vegas is not that great for rendering speeds. Premiere Pro takes about how long the clip is for me. That's what we'll mainly be doing though, exporting to DVD.

One other question, does FCP have a lot of effects, or 3D Titles, or anything like that? How do these compare to Premiere? We're doing car dealer commercials...and they tend to like those.

<<<-- Originally posted by Tim Frank : Can only use on one computer at a time with the USB Key. -->>>

Actually I don't believe you are allowed to use any of these programs simultaneously on more than one computer. Only difference is that Avid has a way of enforcing this.

Originally posted by Tim Frank
One other question, does FCP have a lot of effects, or 3D Titles, or anything like that? How do these compare to Premiere? We're doing car dealer commercials...and they tend to like those.
I can't speak to FCP, but you should really get up to speed with After Effects.

You'll blow them out of the water with all kinds of title effects.

Here is a similar program

http://www.mainconcept.com/mainactor_v5.shtml

They have a fully functional demo that only has the restriction of watermarking footage.

They must be good programmers, as other companies license the mpg2 encoder (Adobe)

And the super cool thing is you can use it on Linux. So you could create a turnkey system for pretty cheap!

Give them at least a download. It's only $199 for the complete program.

One other question, does FCP have a lot of effects, or 3D Titles, or anything like that? How do these compare to Premiere? We're doing car dealer commercials...and they tend to like those.
If you're looking for lots of effects stuff, you might want to take a look at Edition. It has lots of real-time and renders in the background, so you wouldn't have to render much. It has tons of different effects.

http://www.videoguys.com/edition.html

IMO special effects are usually cheesy and don't make up for a lack of good content. As far as transitions and video effects go, most are really cheesy and not impressive. Well I'll get off my soapbox now...

Thanks for the suggestion but I don't think I'd ever buy a Pinnacle product again. I could never get one to work for the life of me without crashing. Yeah, the effects are cheezy...but we're doing car commercials...the king for cheezy commercials with cheezy effects.

What editing program do you think is best for editing LONG hours of video. We'll be doing 30-hours of total video in one thing, however I was thinking now that once we're done editing it all-toghther its going to have to be broken down into 2 hour sections. We're going to need a program that will handle a significant amount of video in its timeline. Is FCP up to this?

I know Avid is, but I need to figure out how to use it first.


Premiere Pro would be the best for this with their new sequence feature. I can easily break everything down into 2-hour sequences and then add it all-together in the end.
Do you think on a well-built computer, (say 2.8ghz p4, 2GB ram, and a couple 120gb hdd's) would be able to handle that without crashing Premiere. I don't want to be saving every couple minutes scared that I might crash it. I'm also a person that clicks around if a program is frozen...which can end up helping to crash it more in the end.


Once again I think Premiere would be the cheapest route for us to go with simply because we're not buying a Mac, so you save right there. You can add multiple burners to a PC, and we can upgrade the storage as we go. We'd be spending maybe $1000 per comptuer with 2 burners vs, $1800+ for a comparable mac. Not to mention there's the video editing software cost on top of that.

FCP kind of has an issue with large, complex sequences. Once it starts getting big your FCP project size will grow (~10-30MB) and sometimes you have to wait for a "Preparing Video for Display" window. There are workarounds for it. The one that really works is editing in smaller sequences, and then putting everything together (with nesting, or by cutting and pasting).

No idea about Avid or Premiere Pro.

The NLE you are looking at might have 2 or 4 hour limitations.

<<<--
Actually I don't believe you are allowed to use any of these programs simultaneously on more than one computer. Only difference is that Avid has a way of enforcing this. -->>>

I just researched this issue for non-simultaneous use on different machines. With Vegas if you want to use the software on a different machine you will have to re-register it. With Avid you should be able to have non-simultaneous use on multiple machines by moving the key.

Okay, Thanks Glenn. That will certainly affect our decision now.

I know that you aren't "supposed to" use most software on multiple computers...but the fact that I'm buying a license for it is enough for me. PRemiere doesn't have any type of "Activation" except for their media encoder and so far I've been able to activate my "borrowed" version (not borrowed from a friend). Its Avid's protection that will probably keep me from buying it.

Hi guys

Just to add my 2c, I tried edition but the thing got really unstable on me during the final editing and I don't trust it anymore but it was the first time I used it and maybe I was using it wrong. Didn't like large timelines.

I'm currently using Edition Pro and I like it. Handles lots of video nicely but I hate having to wait for the rendering. I know I should get a bit of hardware for this but I can't justify it for the amount of work I do which is non commerical. Edition was king for rendering and I liked it for that.

Tried the trial of Vegas and I didn't like the user interface so I gave up on it pretty quick. So I can't really say anything good or bad for it as I rekon it's good but just not for me. I might use it on and off for some of it's filters as go beyond whats' availalbe in Premier.

As far as it goes, I reckon use what comes natural. The best NLE can't make good videos, only you can.

Donie

Try Edius 2.0
http://www.canopus.com/us/products/EDIUS2/pm_EDIUS2.asp

I downloaded Canopus last night and....I REALLY like it. Even more than Premiere!! A Few questions though:

Is the Hardware encoder card required? Or what does it actually benifit for you if its not required? Is it just for like rendering or does it actually render the files as you work on it? Like is it something I would benefit from for paying the extra $100 to buy it in a bundle?

I'm glad you like it!
No.. the hardware card is not required. Edius 2.0 works with and off the shelf OHCI DV capture device.
It *will* get better performance using Canopus hardware but as computers get faster that margin narrows.

Edius doesn't "background" render or give you a "preview" of the video. Edius plays everything out in RT over firewire.

A good bundle would be Edius 2.0 and the ADVCio card which is an OHCI card with analog out so you don't need to go through your camera to send the video to an external monitor.

Plus it'll work with all the other NLEs like Vegas, and Premiere.

I downloaded it too and fell in love with it.

One problem I didn't like though and forgive me if I have this wrong but if you have multiple video layers and they are stacked on top of each other, how do you pick them all up with the mouse and move them as a group? I do this all the time because I'm always making a mess and need to drag stuff around to sort it out.

If it can do that it's a super package. The speed is incredibel. No rendering time at all and as smooth as silk. Maybe it needs to do some final rendering before output but it certanily didn't look like it needed to. I need to spend a little more time on it.

The real time effects are so easy to use. I was able to do stuff really quickly. Nice and intutive.

I'm very tempted to replace Premier with it. But I think I will play around a bit more to see if I can find soemthing that would stop me...

Regards
Donie

That is one of the things it's lacking. A multiple select/move tool. You can move groups using CTRL+ALT then drag.
Check the helpfile for more keyboard shortcuts there are a ton.
CTRL+ Mousewheel zooms the timeline
the mousewheel can be used to adjust nearly every value in every window. Like speed adjustment, color correction just scroll the wheel.

You can also drag a box around multiple filters and make them a single preset by dragging them over to the effects palette.

Then you can blend to the group with the "blend filters" filter.


It's fun and fast!

<<<-- Originally posted by Michael Dontigney :

You can also drag a box around multiple filters and make them a single preset by dragging them over to the effects palette.

Then you can blend to the group with the "blend filters" filter.
-->>>

That's neat. ;)

I'm usign the demo at the moment so I don't have a handy manual. Does the full verison come with a decent manual?

Where is the cheapest place to buy online? I can use this along with Premier. What would be the easiest way to integrate with a premier workflow? Juat import the AVI?

Thanks
Donie

The manual isn't too bad (it's not great either) and you also get a tutorial DVD along with a tutorial guide.

I'll also be releasing my tutorial DVD (I made and sold a ton of he Edius 1.5 two DVD tutorial set) but it mostly covers the Inscriber Title Motion included with 2.0 and ProCoder Express.
It'll also have many other tricks and tips.

The cheapest way fright now is to go to http://www.froogle.com and do a search for "Canopus Edius" you can get the 1.X version which entitles you to a FREE upgrade to 2.0. The 1.X can be found for as little as $260 which is a heck of a deal considering you get Inscriber TM (which blows away the Adobe titler in AP 6.5 and Pro) and ProCoder Express for Edius which is also standalone.

Hi Michael

I live in Ireland so I must first wonder if the free upgrade is availalble here?

What is Inscriber TM? I don't see it on Canopus's website?

Thanks
Donie

I'm not sure.. You could check the Canopus website for a dealer near you and give them a call. http://www.canopus.com

Inscriber is one of the best CG title tools on the market. Adobe licensed their technology to create the titler in Premiere Pro (and 6.5) but they left off many of the really cool features like animations and logo import/editing.
For more information about Inscriber and a downloadable manual for TM:
http://www.inscriber.com/products/NLE%20Titling%20Plug-ins/TitleMotion/index.html

I have a general problem with not following licensing agreements when it comes to software installation. I feel that it hurts developers, consumers and ultimately doesn't give our children a very good example to follow. People might find the agreements unfair, and if they do so there are options. Unfortunately, many people dont avail themselves of those options.

Well the company I am with is making the decisions but the general idea was to experiment with our own home computers with video editing programs...pick one you liked the best. Then they will purchase one copy of that and start using it with the company. If all turns out okay I am 100% positive we will get full licensed for it, however it is a smart business decision to not fully invest into a product before you are sure its doing what you want and more importantly need it to do.

There are some programs however that allow you to do more than one installation of software.

For instance, I feel it is unfair for me to pay $500-$600 for OfficeXP when I can only use it on one comptuer. I own a desktop and laptop...I can only use one at a time so why should I have to have different licenses for each one if I can only use one at a time. Thats when I think its unfair.

I posted this but Chris booted it with another I guess.. hehe.

Edius 2.0 comes with two licenses. One for your desktop PC and one for a Laptop.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Ah, well that makes a lot of sense! Yeah I noticed a e-mail saying I had a reply but I didn't see one anywhere. Oh well. Thanks for all the help guys!

> (FCP) Cons: Expensive system to setup. I don't own a mac to play
> around with it for awhile like I have for Avid and Vegas...so if we
> went Mac it would cost more and we're stuck with it!!

Well... how much does your time cost? If you get FCP and a new Mac it will be running stable after you apply the free patches... that's just a few hours after you opened the boxes and plugged the stuff in.

The time you will spend getting the PC hardware/software combo to work in a stable manner (if that ever really happens for your particular setup) will probably be more expensive than the difference you would pay for buying a the Mac system Now if you add the fact that the G5 is a real 64-bit machine (even though the software does not take full advantage of it yet), you will quickly realize the Mac ends up saving you money up the road.

Of course you have to have the money at hand to spend it first, whereas many of us do have some time on our hands and we might actually *like* tweaking our toys... don't we all? (grin).

But for me it is clear, from a business standpoint it makes more sense to go Mac for DV, just like it used to be for graphics (and probably still is).

Peace.

Some FCP users report that FCP is still crash-prone fresh out of the box with patches. Apple has had a lot of bad releases lately, and definitely competes with the PC nowadays. QT releases would mess up FCP, OS X patches would do the same, Panther would kill firewire drives, iDVD, and FCP4 pre-patched is buggy.

OS X has even crashed on me- I've never seen XP/2000 BSOD or crash on me. However, I find that XP is bloated with lots annoying crap like outlook, sticky keys, the dog in explorer, etc. Macs are a lot more user friendly, although they also have dumb stuff like the 1-button mouse (get a 2-button scroll mouse of course).

The G5 isn't really 64-bit as the OS isn't really 64-bit and it'll take some time for software to come out. By then, you could be upgrading (2 years would seem reasonable). Also, 64-bit computing (more RAM, bigger numbers) is not very useful for video right.

I'd probably look at the tool you want, and then pick the platform that goes with it. The difference in Macs VS PC in terms of stability is not that great. You may find that Macs are easier to use, which you can guestimate and factor into your costs.

As for buying a system now, you should be able to get a stable FCP setup from a VAR like Promax. I doubt you can get a stable Premiere Pro setup until that program gets patched. The other programs you'll have to do a little research on. Vegas should be rock solid for nearly everyone.

I've edited 4+ hours of DV, Mpeg 1 and 2, as well as Uncompressed 32bit on the timeline of Edius 2.0 and not had a crash editing for 18+ hours straight (in a rush).

I'd call that VERY stable.