Pro video blog…Produced by Philip Johnston DoP/Editor

As far as I am concerned I have four choices when it comes to editing for the rest of 2012…

1. Stay with FCP-7

2. Move over to FCP-10

3. Re learn Premiere Pro CS5.5

4. Start afresh with Premiere Pro CS6

Lets start with FCP-7, a program that I have been editing with for the best part of 5 years and am very comfortable with but as a serious editing program has now been left behind with rendering and frame rate problems with no possibility of any further updates from Apple.

Final Cut Pro 10 has very good points not to mention the vast amount of plug-ins being produced almost weekly for FCP-10, Apple are supporting it and updating it with new features like Canon MXF and 1080 50p support… but it does not act the way you think it should act and thats a serious stumbling block and a lot of the FCP-7 style of editing is hidden. I have lost material using FCP-10 even lost edited projects and that disturbs me.

Premiere Pro 5.5 is a bit quirky and does not behave as you expect coming from Final Cut but it will allow you to use the same Matrox MX02 MAX box and drivers as Final Cut Pro 7 giving you a safety margin if all else fails.

Premiere Pro CS6 is very responsive using the Mercury engine via the Nvidia FX4800 graphics card for mac. It has a “Final Cut look” about it which is very satisfying and you can now choose between one clip or the other the same as FCP-7 which means Adobe have been listening to Final Cut end users. Adobe major on Premiere Pro as a company, the same cannot be said about Apple so Premiere in my opinion has a future. The downside is the Matrox MX02 box which needs “flashed” with drivers 3.1.0.0086 installs the Matrox MXO2 MAX v3.1 (build 86) software for Mac OS X Lion only (10.7.4). This software supports Adobe CS6 only (with Premiere Pro 6.0.1 and Media Encoder 6.0.1).

By doing this you are sailing with Premiere Pro CS6 alone with no FCP-7 backup.

I gave my friend Paul Joy a phone this afternoon who switched over to Premiere Pro last year and Paul told me that he is now glad to have swapped over as he feels Adobe are listening to the end users and have improved Premiere no end with the addition of CS6. There are a few bugs in CS5.5 that seem to have been dealt with and the look and feel of CS6 is very close to FCP-7.

Paul has written about his experiences using CS5.5 http://www.pauljoy.com/2011/07/final-cut-pro-to-premiere-pro-six-months-in/#more-3703

Philip Bloom has moved over to Premiere Pro and has been using CS6 for a few months now…”Since getting CS6, I have been sinking my teeth into it and found it incredibly rewarding and exactly what I needed FCP to become. It’s also better for mac users without Nvidia cards as the Open CL means we can get the Mercury Engine working on non-Nvidia graphics cards. Multi-format timelines with NO TRANSCODING? Brilliant! I can even mix 24p and 25p on the same timeline. One of the projects I am editing currently is a documentary with epic, F3, a f100,5dmk2 footage all on the same timeline, all native. It works. Yeah the 5k stuff struggles on my laptop and I have to drop resolution, but you can do it. The rest of the stuff works beautifully.”

Philip has written about his experiences moving over to CS6 http://philipbloom.net/2012/05/08/cs6

In PART TWO on the 31st May “Making the jump” I will tell you my final decision to go with FCP-10 or Premiere Pro CS6

author

Having been working in the video business since 1988 I have amassed a great amount of knowledge of both the kit and production values over the last 30 years.

6 thoughts on “PART ONE…Which way to go ?

  1. I have not read if Pr6 has resolved the audio issues. I attended an industry event over the holidays and heard at roomful of other editors complaining about audio artifacts.

  2. You are forgetting two big players. Smoke for Mac and Lightworks. Both have been around for a very long time, about 20 years and both have been used on the bigest productions. Smoke for Mac is great value for money and with the 2013 release it will be even more so. The only drawback is that it only runs on Mac and if you want the hardware package that runs on linux you’ll have to break the bank (and lots of people have still done it). Lightworks is also very interesting. It’s been around as a turnkey system for a long time being used on films like Hugo and Pulp Fiction even. Yesterday they’ve finally released the free version for windows and the linux and mac versions are around the corner. Personally I’ll be switching to Lightworks. For it’s speed, focussed editing and a couple of other unique features found nowhere else. With a yearly subscription of 60 dollars for the pro version it’s almost a no brainer.

  3. Can anyone explain what Philip Bloom means by saying he can mix 24 and 25p footage with CS6? Doesn’t this cause timing issues due to frame addition or removal (i.e juddery footage) depending upon base sequence setting at a 24 or 25p timeline? Does CS6 have some means of correction?

  4. Edius is by far the BEST NLE available today!

    If u tried it – you would not go back to any other

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