BESIDES THE FACT THAT IT IS ON PC AND NOT MAC... why do you use Premiere Pro 2 over, say, FCP? I know the interfaces are similar. Is FCP much better? If they offered FCP for PC, which woulld you choose?

FCP. I love the interface, but in terms of stability, Premiere has a ways to go. It's crashed for me since day 1, version 6.5. This is similar with all of Adobe's products (minus photoshop, as I never seem to push it that much).

PP has easy image manipulation but it is generally very buggy and requires 3rd party plugs for many workflows. FCP is UNRIVALED in its ability to work with various formats, codecs, etc. NATIVELY. You can edit Varicam, HVX, uncompressed, etc. all right out of the box, generally in real time and without conversions, plug-ins, etc.





ash =o)

I spent a day going from the adobe stand to the fcp stand to the avid stand at an exhibition - sitting and watching the demos. I'd used Avid a bit, but only in somebody elses suite, and I'd been using 6.5 for a while. I had no real preference, and indeed - each demo I watched turned me, then the next tuened me again. The people doing the demos are really skilled, so I worked on the assumption that they would not demo any of the areas of weakness. I need to do multi camera editing, and I was most impressed by the fcp and Premier sessions. In the end, I couldn't decide, so went with Adobe - as I already had photoshop and 6.5 and got on with them, this seemed sensible.

PP2 has been stable -never crashing once. Mind you, the computer is not connected to the net, and only has adobe and sony soundforge on it. No office stuff, no freeware, nothing!

It does what it says on the box, with no problems at all. I'm very happy with it. No doubt the other two players have features I don't have - but so far, I'm not bothered. I don't send my files to anybody else - so cross compatability isn't an issue.

Paul is absolutely right. I have an old AMD PC, only 1.6 GHz processor but lots of RAM (2 GB). I can run PPRO 1.5, Encore DVD, Audition, and Photoshop all at the same time (only using one at a time, of course), without crashes for days and days!

The secret is, and this is where Paul hit the nail: wipe your drive clean, install XP with no junk (aka service packs), install your drivers and your software. NEVER connect to the internet, never install any freeware or any other unnecessary software. It will work like a charm!

Long timelines of nested sequences and plugins such as AspectHD are where things get ugly. I have a quadcore Opteron workstation with 4 gigs of ram and 1tb of space and Premiere still finds excuses to quit out on me. I don't have "junk" on my computer, just editing and audio applications. And to think that connecting to the internet affects the stability of an application is rather silly. I worked at a cable channel for a summer and all of their Avid Composer stations were internet connected. Maybe I can see supplying that suggestion to someone that doesn't know they really haven't won an Xbox, but c'mon...please.

When I produced the Premiere Pro 1.5 tutorials for Lynda.com, I was faced with a huge task. I am a technical guy without much artistic or storytelling talent. So in order to come up with a story quickly, I just "borrowed" the footage from the FCP tutorials that had already been produced. It all belonged to Lynda.com so I was in no danger of being accused of plagerism. Laziness, yes. Lack of talent, yes. Plagerism, no.

What this meant was that I needed to study the FCP tutorials and recreate the exact same output using the exact same assets. To the frame. Especially since I wanted to use the same music which had been cut to the exact frame.

It quickly became apparent that the differences between FCP and Premiere Pro were not as great as I expected. There were a few nifty things in FCP that I wish were in Premiere Pro, but there were some things in Premiere Pro that meant I did not have to explain the FCP workarounds to get to the same point.

The ability to edit audio to the frame level in PPro is nice. The ability to drop things in particular places rather than use a modifier key in FCP is also nice.

I would say that it does not matter which you use. Any of the FCP advantages are balanced by the Adobe Dynamic Link between PPro and After Effects as well as the sample level audio.

So, I believe that PC users should use Premiere Pro and Mac users should use FCP. There is not enough of a difference to warrant changing your entire operating system and buying new software to warrant the change. Not anymore there isn't.

One last thing. If you are editing with the stated purpose of getting a job as a professional editor, there could still be some advantage to learning FCP. Or AVID for that matter. If you are editing for yourself, then pick one and learn it well. For people with talent, the NLE should stay out of your way, not limit your creativity. You should know it so well that it is nothing more complicated than knowing which end of the paintbrush to hold.

So, I believe that PC users should use Premiere Pro and Mac users should use FCP. There is not enough of a difference to warrant changing your entire operating system and buying new software to warrant the change. Not anymore there isn't.
I agree with most of what you said except the quoted paragraph. I see plenty of reasons to spend the extra cash and do a full blown switch. In my opinion it depends more on the individuals needs than anything else.

FCP is supported by the industry a lot more than Premiere... which means all the newest hardware/software are almost always made for FCP then if you're lucky Premiere. Working in a professional environment and needing to hand off a FCP project to someone else. But more on track of this topic... I've had soooo many problems with PP2 I never want to look at it again. It's literally killing my current project because I either can't export files of decent quality (if at all) or I don't have a good pipeline between the apps I need to use. Adobe doesn't provide an intermediate codec of any kind so it's just one more hurdle to overcome.

...I can go on and on.

From my standpoint, the answer is Operating System. I'm on PCs because that is what I've always used. I build systems myself, can trouble shoot them, and I love the availability of virtually any application at reasonable prices.

My first experience with Premiere was with 6.5 when I got it with an editing board, the Pinnacle Pro One. I have become accustomed to its interface, and even though I also have Vegas 7 on board my system too, I keep going back to Premiere.

I don't have the crash issues some speak of, but my experience is that that those experiencing them are usually running into some kind of hardware flaw, usually memory or harddrive set ups that they just don't want to address, and want to blame on Premiere.

No offense meant, but the key is to master your NLE. If Premiere Pro causes you problems, it is a shame, and a good reason for you to switch. It does not cause me the same problems, nor many of the people I communicate with regularly.

That said, I agree that when you are working in a group, you should use what the group agrees on. FCP has almost always had that honor. But times are changing and Premiere Pro has caught up.

If you were working with HDV, my guess is that you would be happier with Premiere Pro due to the Cineform Aspect HD or even Prospect HD product. Yes, it is an extra charge, but worth it.

If there is any assistance I can provide you with your export problems, please let me know.

If you were working with HDV, my guess is that you would be happier with Premiere Pro due to the Cineform Aspect HD or even Prospect HD product. Yes, it is an extra charge, but worth it.
I disagree but admit that my problems might not affect everyone. I actually got a refund because the problems (for me personally) were a deal breaker.

If there is any assistance I can provide you with your export problems, please let me know.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=80029
Anyway to get an ULTRA high quality version out of PP2 and into FCP would be awesome.

I disagree but admit that my problems might not affect everyone. I actually got a refund because the problems (for me personally) were a deal breaker.


http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=80029
Anyway to get an ULTRA high quality version out of PP2 and into FCP would be awesome.

Why would you want to get a high quality version out of PP2 and into FCP?!?!
Just use PPro. Put your HDV footage into a HD SDI project, do you color corrections etc. and export from there...... Great footage!

Why is it that we have to get into arguments over computers, and that is what this is! FCP does not run natively on PC's and PPro does not run on MAC's. How about we get back to specific issues and helping each other.


Mike

Like Nathalie Wood, I grew accustomed to her face....

If you start with a PC then you have the option of going with Edius, Premiere or Vegas. If you start with a MAC you can go Avid or FCP.

If you already have a PC, and tried, like I have, Edius, Ulead MSP, Vegas and Premiere Pro (never tried Liquid) and one of them suits your workflow and the editing style suits you, and it is complemented with applications like Audition, Encore, Illustrator, Photoshop and most importantly After Effects, Dynamic Link and Bridge, there is not much to choose from, is there?

Why would you want to get a high quality version out of PP2 and into FCP?!?!
Just use PPro. Put your HDV footage into a HD SDI project, do you color corrections etc. and export from there...... Great footage!

Why is it that we have to get into arguments over computers, and that is what this is! FCP does not run natively on PC's and PPro does not run on MAC's. How about we get back to specific issues and helping each other.


Mike
Haha, way to start the "lets all just help each other" revolution.

It just occured to me that the simple way to get the highest quality image from one platform to the other is as a numbered series of stills. Huge storage issues, but that is probably the simplest and more quality conscious way.

What do people think about that option?

Thats what they do for EFX work and some features.....
Impractical in day to day editing.....
I have both platforms....
Made the switch to FCP because it just works with
P2 and the HVX200.....
I like the color-correction tools in FCP better than
in any PC editing app.
I can export an OMF file and send it over the net to
my audio studio for sweetening. They send me .aiffs back.
I can do many operations right in FCP that I used to
do in AE - had to do in AE on the PC.
I still use AE for some things but find myself
using it less and less.
I just finished editing a 5 screen HD show.....
I had 5 HD sequences open and then could nest those in
another sequence and scale to show the client what
the presentation would look like.....
(Yes I did have to render but times were managable)
I tried doing edits like that in Premiere years ago with SD
footage running SCSI raids and had problems....
Maybe Premiere works better now but I won't visit that
software again.

It just occured to me that the simple way to get the highest quality image from one platform to the other is as a numbered series of stills. Huge storage issues, but that is probably the simplest and more quality conscious way.

What do people think about that option?
That's exactly what I did. LOTS of full res tga's. Then exported all audio as one really long audio track. Movie wise I couldn't figure it out because nothing would work.

i've been using adobe products for 10 years now...yah sure premiere messes up once and again..but if u have edit rig it shouldnt.

I would love to go into FCP but i jsut odnthave the $$ to swich to mac just yet....and i'm hoping p2 will be suported by premiere next version.

In all honesty like i said before, it doesnt amtter what u edit on, as long as u get the end product to the client. I can work super fast in pro, so why would i switch to something and re learn it(like vegas or avid). Its good to know more NLE's, but not necessary i dont think. But it also depends what type of work one does right.

I've used FCP, PP (and old Premiere a long time ago) and Vegas (escaping from old Premiere). FCP does support some codecs (DVCPro50 for one) that PP doesn't. However, I don't see the loyality to it otherwise. IMHO, PP and FCP have a very similar interface. I found the audio work easier in PP. Ditto the video filters...and more of them. Both have subclips, folders, etc.

FCP is more widely supported at the pro level, but that doesn't affect me. In fact, Cineform with the promise of a high quality editing result is a much bigger inducement to use PP for me that any other possible inducement.

David

Note: I deserted Vegas for PP years ago for two reasons: Vega didn't support subclips, sequences and folders in a way i could manage project; and Adobe integrated Audition, which was Cool Edit Pro, which I was already using and is IMHO the best low end audio editor.

I use Premiere and the whole Adobe Suite at work but when I get home its FCStudio for me, or Premiere if really needed to. I think the key to using Premiere and probably my biggest reason is the Photoshop integration. The full integration with AE, PS, and Premiere is very nice. FCP although integrated with Compressor, Soundtrack Pro, etc. still lacks the image editing integration so that is a pain sometimes for me. Premiere never crashed on me but a few times so I guess im a lucky one. I love using it still and I know the Adobe products better than Apple right now but sooner or later im sure ill grow to love both equally.

-Kyle

I use PP, FCP, FCE, Liquid, Avid, Edius and MSP. I teach television production so I need to be reasonably proficient with all these NLE's. In our edit lab at school I have as many freezes and force quits with FCP as I do wioth PP. My students prefer PP because they find it more intuitive and simple to use. For my side business I mostly use Edius. Very stable and real "realtime".

The secret is, and this is where Paul hit the nail: wipe your drive clean, install XP with no junk (aka service packs), install your drivers and your software. NEVER connect to the internet, never install any freeware or any other unnecessary software. It will work like a charm!


Perfect example of what I do also. I have a dual boot scenario. One XP install is for general stuff (office, games etc). The other is editor only. ONLY Adobe Production Suite, Photoshop, and a few encoders and titlers. Never a crash once and it runs MUCH faster than on a sw bloated install of XP. I also slipstream my editor XP install so that just the bare minimum installs (no theme, no firewall, no security center, no apps or services that won't ever be used -not even calc.exe). Totall processes after a boot into editor desktop is somewhere in the teens. THEN I only use windows certified drivers as well.

So...

Why do I use PPRO? I've used Premiere for years now and have been quite happy. FCP, if you didn't know, was written by some of the former Premiere coders. So there is a lot of that Adobe power in FCP and vice versa. I don't see the point in shelling out loads of money for MAC JUST to run FCP. Now if you already have a MAC, then great! All NLEs do the same thing in the end, it's just how you utilize what you know.

I've had soooo many problems with PP2 I never want to look at it again. It's literally killing my current project because I either can't export files of decent quality (if at all)


Sounds like issues with your PC hardware/drivers/rogue-software than the NLE itself....

I've been in IT for well over 10 years and seem to notice that people that have serious issues with their NLE usually have something ELSE in their system causing these crashes...

Regarding the crash issues, I'd agree that it is probably some other kind of hardware issue that'd causing it. I'm a techie myself and have been running PPro on many different configurations for years without problems.

As for choice of NLE...... I'd agree with the other NLE-agnostics: in use, no particular preference.

However, for other reasons, I'd prefer PPro. - I'm currently working on a major project with the editor in Toronto, and the director here in Montreal. We've got a fancy proprietary system set up here that we can take an EDL from the editor and do an instant online (2k) edit with it. We tell him to make some changes, and presto, instant reflection in the online. So why do I prefer PPro?

He's using FCP, we're using PPro. I just spent 3 days tracking down a minute error in the whole system all the way down into FCP's method of re-linking to footage. This issue itself is already pain in the ass enough, but the gall of the Apple rep we called was even worse. Instead of trying to help, he said we needed to switch our system to a Mac with FCP. Never mind all the other problems that would cause (including with our needed AE integration), the idea of basically giving Apple $10,000 because of one tiny little flaw that's entirely based on their unwillingness to integrate with others annoys me to no end!

I'd love to tell my editor to get PPro....... but he just got his new $10,000 Mac...... I bet he'll love that.

I have been a Premier user for the last 9 years, but recently switched to FCP and I love the way everything handles so smothly in a Mac, I simply wish I made the switch even earlier. In my mechine even without a special capture card, FCP reproduces images much cleaner than PP with dedicated cards in DV/DVCAM format.

I've used both Macs and PCs for over 10 years now in production, everything from dedicated Media100 and Avid systems to simple firewire/DV systems with FCP, Avid, or Premiere. I've even used the newtek videotoaster on amiga and PC. I've also used Premiere since version 5.1cRT and FCP since 1.0. At one of my jobs I use FCP on a daily basis. For my personal projects I use Premiere. I'm equally proficient in either and can take or leave both, I don't really care. But, I chose to use Premiere because the interface seems snappier and there's a lot more flexibility to what you can achieve - at least in my opinion.

However, there are differences and I think it all depends on your skill set, requirements, and deliverables.

You can't beat the integration of the Adobe Products; but more people are generally familiar with FCP and so can be productive using the same seat/system.

I see the Adobe solution for someone who wants to learn everything from the beginning and retain control ove the entire project.

I see the FCP solution for someone who just wants to learn how to edit and fast, with an option "now" to learn the rest as you move up or grow. The way Apple has positioned FCP is directly against AVID, which shares the same paradigm. I'm pretty happy that the competition has reduced prices to the level they are at now tho! (Pity Discreet Edit wasn't able to continue, that was a great editing app at it's time).

For my part I've had FCP quit on me for no reason (my work system has 2 GB of RAM and no other software) and when you open the project or recover the project there's problems or lots of work lost.

I've never had that kind of crash with Premiere, nor really any kind of crash unless I was really pushing the envelop and had 4 layers and multiple filters, 3rd party effects rendering - tho usually this was the hard drive choking.

Final thoughts. There is no one ultimate editing application right now, though we can hope it will come around sometime...for now though use what suits your style. To figure out what your style is can be expensive if you have to purchase the stuff yourself but at that point you buy what you can afford and live with it.

I use Premiere Pro 2.0 instead of FCP because PPro2 is better. I've been using FCP a lot at work and it's just not as fast, intuitive or robust. For example dragging the timeline on the fcp is just hell, on ppro it's smooth, accurate and easy to use. Especially in longer projects.

FCP has bad motion controls and no integration with after effects. Premiere has bezier curves so I don't have to bring everything to after but if I have to it's a lot easier to do.

FCP with a mac g5 is also slower than my older pc with an athlon 3000+. Now I have a core 2 duo so the difference is pretty big.

FCP has also worse audio manipulation tools. I tend to do a lot of audio mixing while editing because sound is 80% of the production and I need to change audio around while editing a lot.

I really don't get all this premiere bashing. FCP is not much different except worse in a couple of areas. Yes premiere can crash occasionally (save often), but my first experience with FCP was about one crash per hour in a complex project. I love pc's and how you tinker around with everything, use for example a frameserver to get material straight to virtualdub from premiere pro etc. Quicktime is pain and exporting is better with premiere pro 2. Both fcp and ppro2 have lousy scalers so I tend to scale everything with a different program.

I use Premiere Pro 2.0 instead of FCP because PPro2 is better. I've been using FCP a lot at work and it's just not as fast, intuitive or robust. For example dragging the timeline on the fcp is just hell, on ppro it's smooth, accurate and easy to use. Especially in longer projects.

FCP has bad motion controls and no integration with after effects. Premiere has bezier curves so I don't have to bring everything to after but if I have to it's a lot easier to do.

FCP with a mac g5 is also slower than my older pc with an athlon 3000+. Now I have a core 2 duo so the difference is pretty big.

FCP has also worse audio manipulation tools. I tend to do a lot of audio mixing while editing because sound is 80% of the production and I need to change audio around while editing a lot.

I really don't get all this premiere bashing. FCP is not much different except worse in a couple of areas. Yes premiere can crash occasionally (save often), but my first experience with FCP was about one crash per hour in a complex project. I love pc's and how you tinker around with everything, use for example a frameserver to get material straight to virtualdub from premiere pro etc. Quicktime is pain and exporting is better with premiere pro 2. Both fcp and ppro2 have lousy scalers so I tend to scale everything with a different program.


I can just see the retorts on this one, lol, just kidding. It kinda boils down to the Chevy vs. Ford argument - they both get you where you need to go though.

Wow it's been awhile since I've been on this ol' forum.

I've been using Premiere since 6.5 and back then the program was slow, buggy, and utilized a rather unfortable workflow

Since then I've obviously upgraded to 2.0 on a dedicated dual-boot XP system. My main attraction to premiere initially was the fact that PCs are scaleable and I could personally perform maintance and upgrades in an affordable fashion. I've used a lot of FCP/AVID/MEDIA 100 systems and for my own projects I keep going back to Premiere. I like the interface and when I go looking for a tool it is always where I expect it.

Back in 2001 I used Final Cut for the first time (around then) and it had significant crashing issues...but the machine was also sub-par. Then through much of my undergrad I ran the campus news station and they were all based in FCP (even though our media playback system was linux and required everything to be written as mpegs [thank god for main concept]) so I spent a lot of time putting together news packages and teaching the system to new students. The machines now were mostly dual processor g4s with ~2gb and we were only editing miniDV...yet I encountered the spinning pinwheel of death more than once or twice. At the same time I was editing on G5s in our master control unit and again I faced the pinwheel of death and these were on lean, tuned, powerful machines.

My home editor is still in transition (waiting to see if I can upgrade to a higher speed ram) and Premiere may render slow depending on other things I'm doing...but it has never once crashed. I think Premiere continues to suffer from 6.5 and below complex when it was still an awkward design.

In June or whenever they are releasing the new Adobe Production Suite for macs I'll be the first one in line. I want to see what this G5 can do to render times and whatnot in what I consider a superior product.

I have been experimenting with some LINUX based NLEs and I hope to write up a little report on what I find. When i was out for NAB last year I saw a demo of this $35k linux turnkey system and it was pretty hot. I've located the software but, as usual with linux, it's been a hard process to install. I'm using the UBUNTU distrubtion and it doesn't grant me root level access unless is suse su via terminal and that's annoying and it's hard to program software to install automatically because of it.

In June or whenever they are releasing the new Adobe Production Suite for macs I'll be the first one in line. I want to see what this G5 can do to render times and whatnot in what I consider a superior product.




Are you kidding me? Adobe is really porting a Mac version again??!!!??? That is awesome news if true! Those that had to suffer (I say that toyingly) with FCP might find the light again in PPRO.

http://www.adobe.com/products/productionstudio/video_mac.html

Yeah bro, looks like it's getting around kinda slowly. There was only one topic on the forum about it.

I use Avid for some news stuff, but generally I say if you have a mac...edit with FCP. I've never had the pleasure to work with film, though I'd love too, so a lot of the avid commands seem foreign when compared to old tape to tape cuts edit commands. Premiere could very likely scream on a dual core intel mac...there is definite potential. In the past I may have been skeptical about a 'port' to mac, but that was generally because 1. 6.5 sucked and it's been a long time since its release 2. Those old versions ran on OS 8/9 and honestly they were as crash worthy as a copy of windows ME.

Today OSX runs on a sophisticated UNIX engine which manages memory far superior to XP and has many dedicated system functions that compliment activities such as video editing. One thing that is especially compelling to me is the potential that MAYBE, JUST MAYBE I'll be able to run this version (after some code-breakers have some time) on my Linux distro. If that becomes the case I'm going to be one of the happiest editors on the planet.

MAYBE, JUST MAYBE I'll be able to run this version (after some code-breakers have some time) on my Linux distro. If that becomes the case I'm going to be one of the happiest editors on the planet.

That is my wish too. Aside gaming and editing I could drop XP like a sack of dung.