Welcome to DV Info, Kevin. It's great to have you aboard! Yes, I certainly wasn't thinking of "abandoning" FCS (or the Mac OS). But I am seriously looking at adding the Production Premium Pack to my tools. (And suffering through a new learning curve.) It's good to know that someone with your superb background in FCP and FCS is available on the DV Info Adobe forums (I was concerned that the only people who might answer queries there are only familiar with PC set-ups and Windows).

I have a question about the Media Encoder. If I use PPro (and After Effects) for heavily graphics-laden training videos, I wouldn't be able to use Apple's Compressor (which only recognizes QuickTime-wrapped files). And I want to avoid transcoding to QuickTime, if possible. I really like the range of controls and tweaking that you can do with Compressor. What is the functionality like with the Media Encoder in CS5?

I'll toss in a word and I'm sure Kevin will be along...

Keep in mind that most of us who have been in the industry longer than 10 years had to move from Macs to PCs at some point...in the mid-90s it was almost impossible to use a PC for video post. I was all Mac until G4s and OSX. Then I discovered Windows systems render times for AE (back in those days there was a significant difference) and decided it might be time for a change.

Media Encoder has a pretty good control set now...different interface than Compressor of course. It's been a while since I've had a full version of Compressor open in front of me, but from talking to people going through the transition, it seems compressor users may be used to preset parameter combinations like "Good, Better, Best" sort of thing, which of course Media Encoder doesn't have...the established output profiles are different, and I've been surprised at the number of people who expect these sorts of things to be the same. As someone on the other side, it is amazing to me how many organizations have their file delivery specs built from info like this instead of actual hard numbers for data rate, frame rate, sample rate, etc.

Media Encoder does seem to be steadily improving for creating H264 output files, though as late as CS4, I'd still find there were times when I hit a compatibility or runnability issue with a client application using ME H264 files, and I revert to QT Pro to make the H264 file, accept the gamma error, and it seems to be fine.

I think you'll likely find that Media Encoder has a fair amount of control over output parameters...and in my experience, if you are doing software training using screen captures, PPro has seemed to be a bit more nimble with non-video framesizes in my experience... There's some pretty respected FCP training out there...that was edited on PPro. ;-)

Thanks very much for that rundown, Tim. Very good info!