Helmut’s article is mostly on the switch and what Premiere does and doesn’t offer, but also talks about the whole FCP X Fiasco.
Yes, well before all of Apple’s recent shenanigans, I started to sense that Final Cut, along with all of Apple’s professional apps and gear, was slowly being strangled to death. Here are a few of the harbingers of doom that caught my eye over recent years:
• Apple took nearly 2.5 years to upgrade Final Cut Studio from version 2 to 3 (and v.3 was only a moderate upgrade at that). Until then, updates had come at a much more aggressive pace.
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Apple cancelled the popular Shake, promising to replace it with a new tool that never came.
• Apple got lazy with its Logic Pro app as well, letting development creep along with an upgrade about every two years.
• Apple stopped updating the Pro page on its web site long ago. There hasn’t been a new item posted in almost two years: http://www.apple.com/pro/
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Apple took more than a year to fix a glaring Final Cut 7 bug that made its Close Gap command unreliable. To break a core Timeline feature like Close Gap and not fix it for 14 months was offensive and inexcusable.
• Apple cancelled its Xserve RAID then its Xserve hardware.
• Apple started taking longer and longer to release Mac Pro workstations, and absolutely phoned in the latest upgrade last July. 511 days in the making, the newest Mac Pro was one of the most un-inspired hardware upgrades I’ve ever seen from Apple.
• Apple pulled out of industry trade events like NAB.
• Multiple rumors (and confirmation of rumors) of significant layoffs in the Pro Apps division.
• Multiple rumors that Apple was trying to sell off its Pro Apps division.
Take just a few of these and maybe they don’t add up to anything. But take all of them together, and it’s a real sign of Apple’s low-to-non-existent priority for professional media. Yes, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while, and by 2010, I reluctantly began to read it. Late last year, I started to look at the two clear alternatives to Final Cut….
The rest of the article has some excellent reasons why he moved to Premiere, and documents the differences and similarities, and really gives a good idea of why to try out Premiere Pro, it really is a must read!