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If you are a video editor and you’ve used Final Cut Pro 7 – this was a very bad week for you. We’d love to hear from you on what you think of the recent change in Final Cut. Today, Adobe made a very big incentive for people to move to Premiere Pro CS5.5 – cutting the price by a massive 50%.
Tell us what you think?
Trial Download of Premiere CS5.5 here
Check out our Premiere Pro Tutorials
Author: RC Concepcion
Rafael Concepcion (RC) is an education and curriculum developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and the co-host of Layers TV - The How To Podcast For Everything Adobe. An Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom, RC has over 10 years in the I.T. and ecommerce industries and spends his days developing content for all applications in the Adobe Creative Suite. RC has held training seminars in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and recently combined his photographic and web experience to teach with famed wildlife photographer Moose Peterson at the "You Can Do It Too" workshops in Mammoth, CA and at the Voices That Matter Web Conference in San Francisco, CA. RC also writes columns for Layers and Photoshop User magazines.
No because I remember too well when Adobe stopped offering the Mac version of Premier a few years back. I was so glad Apple offered Final Cut so that Mac users could actually work on projects.
I would love for my company to switch. In trials of Premiere it seems for the most part way more capable than FCP7 and certainly more capable than FCPX. It works with our existing hardware. The main problem is perception, convincing bosses and decision makers to use software with a previously bad name.
It is like people who switched to Final Cut 6 or 7 years ago, pros laughed in their face and look at FCP7 now, it is the biggest player in the editing game.
That said, it is nearly 4 years old and we need new tech. I would switch.
While maybe not a fixture to the video editing community where I live, I’ve made a decent living being a loyal customer of Apple’s pro video line of hardware and software……until last week.
Apart from the growing list of feature changes and omissions, the app itself is incredibly unstable. My first test was to drag some footage into a project to see how well the native format editing worked, which in FCP 7 required an import into a more native format such as ProRes 4222.
Using a 2gb AVCHD clip, the editing experience was quite random and frustrating. Clips would disappear, video would stop while audio continued, the playhead would keep rolling with no audio or video, etc. This would continue until the app simply crashed.
I was really anticipating this release to the extent that I had a just upgraded my hardware to the latest revs of Apple’s current offerings. However, this is money well spent as Adobe’s products smoke with the new quad-core i7′s.
Performing the same editing test in Premier Pro was effortless and actually enjoyable. The U/I is very similar to FCP, so anyone contemplating the switch needn’t be concerned, you’ll feel right at home. The Mercury engine is truly amazing. I can even edit big jobs on my new MBP with no effort. I don’t know how they did it, but the CS5.5 release was worth the wait.
From a business standpoint, I understand Apple’s decision to drop the pro line of products to reach a far bigger addressable market like consumers. What’s disappointing, though, is their decision to use the Final Cut professional moniker to do so. And if you think that’s an over-statement of the problem, try the new Motion 5 app. It’s reverted to, what looks like, a nice high-end titling program.
I summary, Apple’s entire pro editing line has been transformed into a nice, family-friendly, “even mom can do this!” editing suite while Adobe has clearly advanced our field and made our lives easier with CS5.5.
Thanks Adobe, sorry Apple.
@Craig. Would you happen to work for Adobe by any chance?