OK, I spent a few days with Premiere and here are some of the things that favorably impressed me:
- User Interface. If you have experience with AE then Premiere is a plus. The usual layouts established by Adobe are quite pleasant and the consistency among applications makes it easy to feel at home. Plus, the elements of the UI are placed in a very nice way and very easy to access via mouse, tablet or other pointing devices.
- Multi-camera edit. While FCP has this feature too, the way Premiere implements it is nicer and simpler. The ability to use any user-defined marker as synchronization point is a plus.
- Support for image sequences. Every NLE should have this and it’s quite surprising that FCP doesn’t have it. In Premiere you can load an image sequence from TIFF, JPEG, PNG, pretty much anything. Another plus.
- Audio editing. Premiere has a much more sophisticated editing of audio inside the editor, including support for 5.1 surround sound. In comparison FCP’s features seem quite rudimentary
- Clip Notes. This a big one. Premiere’s and AE’s have ability to export a sequence embedded in a PDF that can be edited by the client and sent back to be loaded as a series of markers in the timeline. What can say. Wow. I never saw anything like that.* Smart search in the project. Very nice and available right there in the window.
- Clip storyboard. While this can be achieved in FCP as well, the ease of use of this feature and the way it can be customized, coupled with the simplicity to set the poster frame really makes it a great editing tool. Now you can create your bins with subclips that can be reviewed for easy reference. The “storyboard” exists in parallel to your default project view, it’s just another tab and so you can have the best of both worlds:
- Clip preview and easy setup of the poster frame. This is another neat part of Premiere’s UI. The scrubbing of the clip’s thumbnail is really easy and accessible.
- File format support. Premiere can support MPEG2 and .m2t files directly, no conversion to QuickTime necessary. I can’t verify this one with the try-out version but it’s part of the specs. FCP can edit only QuickTime files + still images like PSD and TIFF files. Again, Premiere’s support for media formats is wider and more flexible.
- XML project file format. OK, this one is a little bit esoteric. File formats are hardly a concern for editors but the fact that the native format for Premiere’s projects is XML has some huge consequences. First of all XML is a text format, this means that it can be read and updated with a text editor or with simple text-processing tools. It also means that you can take two versions of the same project, run it through a programs like diff, which comes standard with all Macs (it’s a Terminal program), and find the differences between the two files. For example, you can see if a clip was added or removed. With an open format there is a whole set of options that can be explored. For example, I am writing a program to take an FCP XML-exported sequence and import it in Premiere. This would be the foundation of a FCP to Premiere translator so that old projects started in FCP could be continued in Premiere and finished by taking advantage of the integration with After Effects.
Well, that’s it for now, I’ll post more as soon as I gather new elements in my research. Remember, this is not a “religios war”, this is just the pursuit of the best tool for the job.