Over the last 2 days I cut a short film on Premiere Pro CS6. It was shot on a Canon 5D and I had no time to convert the footage, so I figured Premiere Pro was the way to go because I wouldn’t need to re-compress the footage.

I used Plural Eyes to sync the footage to the external microphone, and it worked, though took some finessing, and some manual syncing and I would say it got about 75% of it.

Then I started cutting and had all the crash issues from my earlier post on the NVIDIA GTX 285, but was able to switch to my NVIDIA QUADRO FX 48000 and mostly cleared up the issues. No more serious Error messages, and no more screen going black. Still some random crashes, but nothing too bad, that a quick restart wouldn’t get running again.

I was running the footage out of premiere pro through my DV deck to an external NTSC monitor, and it looked great.

Now I edit in Apple Final Cut Pro 7 and AVID Media Composer, but have always preferred some things of Final Cut Pro. And there are some things about Premiere Pro that I like and some I don’t.

I don’t like how you can only set a duration for your default transition in Premiere Pro, and you can’t set up a favorites bin of effects either per project or within the system. I would always make a bin of favorites in Final Cut Pro with various lengths, and was quickly able to apply any transition I wanted.

I also don’t like how on a clip in the timeline that is not butted up to another clip, all transitions start at it’s cut and can’t be put center on the cut or ending at the cut. You have to extend the clip to make the transition go further than the cut. Now it is pretty easy if you select the cut first as you can just hit E to extend the clip to the playhead, even if a transition is already on it. And I have set command-D to apply the default transition, so I can easily extend clips and apply the default transition with one hand (awesome), but I still want a bin of my favorite effects, and if not in the effects browser, let me do them in the project like I can do with AVID.

The integration with Adobe After Effects is a thing of beauty. Just being able to make changes so quickly is totally awesome. Once you have either imported a After Effects Sequence or sent files to one from Premiere, you just save changes in AE and they show up in Premiere, and you render in Premiere. AWESOME! This makes Premiere the best program for graphics intensive stuff bar none. I think Premiere Pro should become the premiere program for Direct Response because of this alone!

When Snapping is turned on, why does the cut tool not snap to the playhead. Now it seems to still cut at the playhead if you are close, but if that is the case, why not snap?

I really don’t like the Time Remapping feature within a clips effects pallet. It is a different kind of keyframe, where you split it to make it softer, but doesn’t work nearly as well as just being able to bezier curve it, or even easy ease or or ease in and out. This should be just like it is in After Effects and it just ins’t, and doesn’t work as well because of it!

Honestly I had some trouble with the select all to the right tool (hold down A to activate). It sometimes put tracks out of sync on me. And it only does one track unless you hold down shift and click while holding shift to select all. I like how you would hit A twice to change it in Final Cut, and think having to hold down 2 keys makes it more difficult.

I don’t like the track selection tools. I keymapped the select all audio and video selections, but they don’t seem to always work, and I often had to manually turn tracks on and off. Now this is slightly upset by not having to set tracks to ripple delete gaps between clips, or even when you do an extract, but still I like how you can option click in Final Cut to select just that track, and think Premiere Pro could use that functionality (as well as making the select and deselect all tracks actually work all the time).

I would like the audio waveform in clips to be a tab like it is in Final Cut Pro. I know you can switch it via right clicking and going down a level and selecting Audio Track, but that is making it much more difficult, than just a tab, which can be quickly switched to. It is better than AVID, as I like to see my Audio in the VIewer and not in the Timeline), but still has too many steps to do something I do so often.

And I know it is a problem with audio from 2 sources, but I hate not being able to go into the audio linked to the video and open it in the viewer and put markers in it for where i want to cut. I often work this way in Final cut Pro, as the audio waveform is so much bigger in the viewer than the timeline, but here Ic couldn’t do it as it was linked to different video I think. I would love to be able to wrap the new audio with the video so it acts like a normal clip and you could use it like it is a single piece of audio and video.

Overall I have really enjoyed using Premiere Pro (though some of the keyboard shortcuts still vex me), and would like to see it supplant Final Cut Pro, because while i like AVID, it is still the same old program, and Premiere feels more powerful, and faster (with a CUDA card at least). I plan on posting more impressions on it in the future.