Helmut Kobler has an excellent article on being a Final Cuttter moving to Premiere Pro

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.

  • 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/


  • 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!

Premiere Pro Needed Feature

So far I am enjoying learning Premiere Pro, in fact much more than I thought I would, but one feature I really miss is iChat theater.

The ability to cut remotely and show your cut and see the producer and let them see you was an amazing addition by Apple, and something that really needs to be added into Premiere to bring it on par with Final Cut Pro 7.

Neptune Salad has a great article on switching to Premiere Pro

Neptune Salad has an article that is worth reading on waiting for Final Cut Pro X to release to start a big job, and then seeing what it is, and moving to Premiere Pro. It is really worth checking out, and looks to be the start of a series of articles.

But the real question anyone who edits is this: What are we going to do right now? I mean what are we actually going to do? As professionals, we don’t have the time to play around with multiple new programs until this dust settles as it could be months, and it might take Apple over a year to put FCP back on track.



And

Honestly, I’m not excited about moving to a new platform. This will be my third (Media 100, Final Cut Pro, now this – go ahead and laugh, Avid users). But the integration of AfterEffects (which is becoming a must-have item for filmmakers, see www.videocopilot.net to understand my zeal) and Photoshop make it an attractive one-two knockout punch.


Kind of how I feel, though he did not get a refund on Final Cut Pro X, and I did, but we both are making the move to Premiere Pro.

Looks like Premiere is how I am going

Looks like I am going with Premiere Pro. It is fast and responsive, though I have had some random crashes, but it was on sequences that I had imported via XML from Final Cut Pro 7.

The thing is the CUDA support with the NVIDIA card is unbelievably fast, and the integration with After Effects plug-ins makes it so usefull.

Honestly I have never seen performance like this

OK, so the same 4 video clips in Canon 60D H.264 on the timeline and I put Magic Bullet Colorista 2 on one, and did a color correct, and then played back in real time! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHY DIDN’T I TRY THIS EARLIER! AMAZING!!!!!!

Sure adding an effect on a second clip basically slowed it down too much and I had to render, but I never thought it would work that well. Wow!

Color me impressed

OK, that is the most responsive timeline I have ever seen.

I just ran my first Premiere Pro 5.5 Cuda test with an NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4800. I imported some RAW Canon 60D H.264 footage, and put it in a timeline, scaled it 50% and added 3 more shots, and it played back smoother and fast than any timeline I have ever seen. Color me impressed.

Premiere might not just replace Final Cut Pro, it might blow it out of the water!

AJA releases Premiere Pro 5.5 Drivers for Real Time

Studio Daily is reporting that AJA has released drivers for Premiere Pro 5.5. that allow realtime editing with the CUDA accelation. They are working fast after Final Cut Pro 7 was killed. Nice!

I installed them and a small test looks like it’s running fine with good performance for the Mercury Playback Engine with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. Once installed, you get a full set of AJA presets:


aja-adobe-seq-presets


If Adobe is really serious about competing in the pro video editing space (and I think they are), they’ll get on their hardware partners like AJA, Matrox and Blackmagic to be as quick supporting Premiere Pro as they have been about supporting Final Cut Pro.