I bet you don’t see this often. There is a perception that Final Cut is regarded as a “pro” NLE and Premiere is not quite at the same level. Or so they say. For years I have been a devoted user of FCP and I really don’t have anything against it. It’s just that Premiere is looking more and more inviting by the day and there is a bit thing that it has that Final Cut cannot even touch: amazing integration with After Effects.Let me get a bit of background here. For the past few years Premiere was supported only on the Windows platform. That move, which I bet Adobe regrets, left the Mac OS field solely in the grasp of a few products: Avid and Final Cut. It’s not a secret that FCP has steadily conquered the Mac market and it’s presence today is massive. Well, last year, at NAB, Adobe announced the new Production Premium suite which included, surprise, surprise, Premiere Pro CS3 for the Mac. Thank you. Finally we get some serious competition on the Mac.My first experience with Premiere was not very encouraging. I was assigned to edit and interview on a PC using Premiere. Double whammy. Premiere and on a PC. I wasn’t happy but I agreed on the assignment and kept an open mind. I was actually surprised to see how similar Premiere was to FCP and I managed to finish the assignment on time and as expected. The problems that I noticed where some serious memory leaks that caused some crashes but I had no way of verifying if they were a Premiere or Windows issue. I left it at that and I was happy when I got to go back to my Mac with all the familiar tools. Fast forward to current time. I firmly believe that After Effects is an indispensable tool for any post production work. It’s just too damn useful, flexible and fun to use to think about a project without it. I even edit photos in After Effects just because I’m more comfortable with its non-destructive filters than the ones in Photoshop. I have Motion and Shake as well and they are never used. Shake is just too crazy complex for me and Motion doesn’t even approaches the power and flexibility of After Effects. I’m sorry, this is just the way I see it.After Effects is also the de-facto standard for Motion Graphics and if you haven’t seen what you can do by combining Cinema 4D with After Effects, you are missing out. Big Time.Before I go further I want to make clear that I’m in no way compensated by Adobe. I just happen to like what they make.Anyway, the push to adopt Premiere comes from my need to use After Effects in my projects. In the past few years I used all kind of tricks to move my footage from FCP to AE. I can export a Sheer Video-based QuickTime file and import it in AE but I loose all the clip information. I could buy the “Automatic Duck” plugin but at $500 it’s just $200 short of the cost of upgrading to the full “Creative Suite Master Series” which includes Premiere, AE, Encore and more. Also, the integration between Premiere and AE is much deeper than just opening a Premiere project in AE so the plugin route is not nearly as interesting.There is also another consideration. The Adobe DVD authoring tool, Encore, is capable of turning the whole DVD menus and videos into a Flash application, making it very easy to distribute your work on the Web, a feature that I don’t see in Apple’s DVD Studio. So, all in all there are several compelling reasons to make the switch to the Adobe’s suite. What remains to be determined is if Premiere can replace Final Cut and that’s what I’m going to find out. I’ll post my findings here, it’s going to be interesting.
Ciao Paolo!
I’m from Brazil, and have had many help from your website. Congratulations for the new visual, hope we can keep all the feeds that you lend us.
I like the way after and premiere interacts, but is no surprise that in brazil the uses of a FCP in a Mac are few, i didn’t tried it yet, but in the video of the band Pearl Jam called “Touring Band 2000″ they did edited all in FCP and MacBooks. And the dinal look of the video, despite its very grainy, looks very tastefull. Hope you have the chance to check that. I would like to achieve that look in some material in the future.
No more to say, just thankyou very much, and keep doing this wonderfull job of yours.
Thanks you Oendel. Regarding acheiving a specific look, try Magic Bullet Looks, http://www.redgiantsoftware.com. It works with AE, Premiere and FCP and it’s a fundamental tool to apply a specific look to your footage.