Editing software question...

[Benjamin Charles]

I've used Adobe Premier Pro throughout my years at college.
Though recently I purchased a Mac.
I know all Adobe products are available to Mac, but the question of using Final Cut has come into mind purely because I am using a Mac now.

Does Final Cut have products that match After Effects etc?
Or am I best sticking with where I am experienced with Adobe?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kim Welch]

Adobe, Avid, iMovie, Vegas Pro 8, Final Cut

Adobe, Avid, iMovie, Vegas Pro 8, Final Cut

I did an interview last week with the editor of the film “He's Just Not That Into You”, Cara Silverman. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0798889/
From what she was saying most people are using Avid or Final Cut that work on feature films and from what I gather Final Cut is on the rise. However, the way Kara put it was “… it doesn’t matter what you cut with. You can use iMovie if it works for you...” I know people will argue but that is what she told me. She also said that whatever you cut with can be transitioned to your distribution medium.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Andrew Laszlo, ASC http://www.studentfilmmakersforums.com/workshops/AL-205.shtml http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0489970/

We were at a tradeshow and that year there were a large number of softwares and technologies that came out and I was asking him questions about what to use and he said something along the lines of”… any of them.” So, my suggestion is not to worry about if you are using the right thing but use the thing that is right for the situation you are in and learn as much as you can about all the tools of the trade you are interested in.

Kim

 

[Benjamin Charles]

Hiya, thankyou for the response.

I'll give Final Cut a shot, see if it's suitable to my editing. If not back to Adobe.

Cheers.

 

[BenB]

Also, it depends on what you plan to do. TV, corporate videos, weddings, film? If you're doing broadcast and film, forget Premiere.

 

[bluewave]

thanks for the advice...


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http://website4actors.com/

 

[grinner]

If wanting to work as an editor, you'll need to learn FCP and Avid to be marketable.
If just wanting to create videos, your flavor of choice is fine.
AE enhances NLEs with effects they can't do. I have an Avid and not a day goes by that I don't use After Efects to do what it can't. Same with FCP, although it's DVE is much better than Avid's.

 

[temerson]

mmm hmmm *clears throat*... Adobe products is currently the only pro-sumer editing software that supports codecs for the Red Cam and the Scarlet. Premiere and After Effects were developed by former Avid designers, and they follow from the same general coding design.

Additionally, whether you are shooting for broadcast is irrelevant to what programs you use to edit and design FX. In broadcast, it depends on what output format you use, and Adobe has added output codecs for all major, generic broadcast file types. I have two friends who used to cut for WB (now CW). One did all of his work on FCP. The other did all his work on Adobe. The only time there were complications was if they were sharing a project - they had to output with no compression between the two. But that was so rare, that it never caused any actual problems.

For film, if you are going to do a film transfer, it doesn't matter WHAT you edit on as long as your transfer team has the capabilities for whatever output format you decide to use.

I'm not saying that Adobe products are superior to FCP, but they are definitely equitable in performance. Most of this is because I'm a big supporter of Adobe products and I get tired of seeing specific calls for FCP for editing jobs. Not post-fx, not color correction, not anything OTHER than editing, and they REQUIRE that you use FCP.

If you are looking for an editor, don't be picky about what system they choose to work on because if your editor is good, they will ALWAYS export in an uncompressed format that matches the requirement for additional post-production work and eventual print. The quality of an editor's work is NOT determined by the particular product he uses to cut.

You can read more of my rant on this particular subject on the Student Filmmakers network here: http://networking.studentfilmmakers...e_Stupid-Pet-Tricks-The-Final-Cut-Pro-Gambit/

 

[BenB]

mmm hmmm *clears throat*... Adobe products is currently the only pro-sumer editing software that supports codecs for the Red Cam and the Scarlet.

Well, "pro-sumer" is the key word here. FCP is professional, not pro-sumer, and does in fact support Red. FCP has over 50% of the professional post-production market.

Avid and FCP are being used for the overwhelming majority of films and TV shows.

That's the simple facts. But yes, you can use any NLE you want. But does Premier have the tools to output to DPX files for film work? Nope. FCP and Avid do.

But yeah, you can use anything you want. All you need for broadcast to output to QT NTSC-DV files (which most tapeless stations accept), or Beta tape, that's easy.

 

[temerson]

BenB,

I think that FCP would fall into the pro-sumer category as well. With the democratization of the technology, it has been adopted by professional videographers and hobbyists alike. However, to describe Adobe systems as "less" than FCP seems a little, well, snooty. I'm sorry if I offend, but that does just rub me the wrong way.

I will not deny that a large majority of professionals choose to use FCP over Adobe, however this may be attributed more to professionals' choice of hardware platform than to the performance of the programs themselves. In the last few years, Adobe has been pimping their new Mac-based programs. In fact, FX designers who have worked on films like Transformers, Iron Man, and Get Smart use Mac-based Adobe programs for a lot of their workload.

The practical differences between the two are so minor as to be insignificant. However, one advantage Adobe does have over Final Cut Suite is the Adobe Bridge software that allows each program in the Adobe Suite integrated workloads. This is especially an advantage, as After Effects and Photoshop are industry-standard, for compositing and graphics respectively. When used as a single package, Adobe Systems acts like a single application. But, this is not to say that FCP won't utilize the same concept on the next evolution.

In the end, FCP is really just the professionals' "choice," and not so much the "best" that is available. Just different. However, with Adobe's expansion onto Mac platforms, we may see FCP's share of industry-business take a dip. Even a significant portion of Avatar was produced in Adobe apps. I'm just sayin'...

PS - On the topic of Red/Scarlet codecs, you are right. FCP does now have the proper updates to support native HD workflows. However, Adobe was the first to come out with it. Additionally, the CS4 4.01 update gives users the ability to import FCP projects into Adobe systems, regardless of whether you are on a PC or Mac.

 

[BenB]

There is a very long, extensive list of feature films and TV shows produced with Final Cut Studio. Not so with Adobe. With things like Cinema Tools, it is in fact a fully professional NLE. And the FIRST NLE that RED worked directly with to support editing for their cameras. It supported RED before anyone else did.

Premier does not come with things equivalent to Cinema Tools or Color. Adobe does not have the audio power of Logic Pro, nor the media and production management power of Final Cut Server, and Shake is a step above After Effects, IF you really want to go there. But based on this type of argument you seem to want to start, this all convolutes things.

PPro also is limited to the codecs it can work with, and falls much short of what FCP can work with. PPro won't work with DPX, for instance. And it's REDCODE support didn't come until May 29, 2009, far behind FCP, which was the first NLE to support the Red One, on the day the first Red One camera was released.

Final Cut's market share has NEVER factually dipped, but has steadily GROWN for the past 4 years, to now own over 50% of the post production market by NAB's own findings.

You're argument includes After Effects with Premiere. After Effects is a professional product that is used in many features, as Shake has been part of every feature that has won an effects Oscar since it was branded by Apple. But when talking NLE's, AE is not an NLE, and Premier is not used in features.

So, you can talk effects, which the majority of that market is Nuke/Maya. Or you can talk NLE's, in which FCP is a proven leader and professional product, as a matter of fact.

To compare Bridge to Final Cut Server (remember, formally Art Box, used by every major network in the world) which is growing very, very fast in market share, is not the same thing. Bridge is NOT FCSvr by a long shot. Again, you're comparing apples to onions. Bridge is not used on international networked production systems, FCSvr is.

Those are the facts, I'm not here to get into a childish pissing match of semantics, just here to state the facts "clearly" without convoluting things.

Now, if you want to show marketing statistics, or list the TV shows and feature films cut on Premier, then that's valid. But to make stuff up is a shame.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're not stating facts, but an opinion. That's a pissing match I will not be goaded in to. I rest my case.

Besides, this is a thread that's a year old. I think the original poster has made up his mind by now.

Fact, the professional market is owned by Avid and FCP, Premiere doesn't come anywhere near them in the market, and in fact only has about 6% of the "professional post-production market" as NAB's marketing research showed at 2009 convention.

 

[grinner]

If it places anything in perspective, I place my clients in the Avid suite.
My kids make their youtube clips with Premiere.
That's not being snooty. One can pay off Premiere Pro quickly and easily with one gig and it has great bang for the buck. It's not realistic to think I could plop a client in a premiere suite for my current hourly rate though. It IS realistic to charge that same rate if I went with FCP though. Avid can pretend to still be the industry standard but they handed that title off to FCP when they killed their meridien line.
Search the common job sites for editors. It's not hard to see where the marketability is. Today more than half the gigs are FCP gigs. The reason is it simply offers the most bang for the buck.

 

[Kim Welch]

thank you for all your support and heads up

thank you for all your support and heads up

i want to thank you guys for all your support. also, a heads up. moving to a new server tonight. bigger much faster with 4 times the RAM as this machine, awesome server with redundant raid drives and full offsite database back ups with an amazing fast network backbone. i should be done in the early AM. If there are any bugs or glitches let me know. you can call or email me.

 

[Tim Kolb]

I think that debating features against marketshare tends to be a conversation where people simply talk past each other.

If you want to be a freelance editor, you'd better know Avid and FCP...no question about that. Corporate production installations for high end have definitely settled in on Avid initially, and now FCP is pushing into Avid's marketshare considerably. Unfortunately Avid became the dominant player, went to sleep, and woke up to see 10,000.00 USD NLE systems eating its lunch while its creative feature set hadn't really kept pace. Avid has been making some pretty massive pricing compromises to try to catch up. Whether they can stop the bleeding or not has yet to be seen.

Premiere Pro has a reputation with the FCP/Avid crowd that is only somewhat earned. Adobe lost a lot of ground through the tape-to-NLE-back-to-tape era when Avid's and FCP's deck control conventions were superior to Premiere/Premiere Pro's and without adequate fine VTR control, PPro was a non-starter in many of these workflows. Period.

As far as huge asset projects, Avid still has the mantle for media management. Final Cut is making inroads with capabilities for the price of course...Adobe has some work to do to orient the application to really establish some clout in this area. Also, the nature of Dynamic Link always running multiple executables in the background has left PPro starved for system resources on 32 bit systems...I had been advocating adding the ability to shut off DL when you start an editing session to allow PPro better access to system resources for simple cutting...it never happened....however...

Now, as Adobe has announced, they're moving to 64 bit only with CS5 versions of PPro and AE, which will open up RAM capacity and allow the system to take advantage of it. (64 bit Macs have been the rule for a while now, and even though FCP is 32 bit native, the ability of all applications to at least grab the maximum amount of RAM is huge when multiple apps are running like FCP, DVDSP, Motion, Color, etc.).

Support for native codecs is a semantic, and somewhat slight-of-hand discussion...PPro supports camera data in it's native form...direct to the timeline, and FCP uses log and transfer to rewrap any non QT media, or media that has significant metadata included. Is this a sin? No... is it "native?" Yes in the sense that the codec and essence file are intact...no in the sense that a "conversion step" is technically still necessary, creating a duplicate file that the camera wouldn't recognize, even though it's not a hard transcode like going to DNxHD would be...

FCP has ProRes, which is now an acquisition format in several devices and cameras, so that is undisputed native support...

Not sure why the impression is that PPro can't handle DPX...BlueFish boards were handling DPX inside of PPro several versions ago... Perhaps there is some nuance that Ben refers to? Log curves? Certainly PPro handles sequenced stills without any fuss at all...I was editing Targa files back in Premiere 6.5.

As far as RED support is concerned, CineForm had a RED RAW to CineForm RAW conversion process that outperformed the FCP transcode (originally not maintaining RAW through the process) by a factor of 100:1 several NABs ago...and RED blocked them from continuing, restraining everyone to the RED SDK, which wasn't very speedy at the time... FCP's support for RED files was early, but anyone who says the workflow was effective (the conversion times defied description) just wasn't being realistic. So early adoption is great, but workable workflows in anything but Scratch weren't all that varied in their arrival dates...


I've somehow survived 20+ years without using Avid or FCP as my primary platform...and I've got some professional credentials and awards...BUT I only hire out as an editor to clients who know the work I do and don't have standardization issues (i.e. an office with 40 FCP or Avid systems back home). Ben's point is completely legitimate on market realities in this respect.

However, I handle 2K RAW on the timeline (for 4 years now), and 4K RAW on the timeline (for a couple years) via CineForm...and 4:4:4 support that outperforms HDcamSR has also been available on PPro for some time via CineForm...so again, the capabilities slide back and forth depending on where you decide to focus. The competency of the RED workflow in Premiere Pro seemed to surprise many of the attendees of the StudentFilmmakers RED workflow seminar we did in New York in December...

The integration of the Adobe Suite is something I use extensively and I do get frustrated with the hoops FCP guys have to go through to deal with images and graphics on the timeline if I'm directing a project that is posting on FCP...and Avid is significantly clumsier than that. To Ben's point about episodic TV and feature films...rarely is the ability to load the layers of a Photoshop file natively an issue in these projects, they need to cut footage and sound...so the capabilities of Adobe's Suite don't necessarily gain them much traction. For Avatar, the overall post was Avid (I think...I can't recall) but the VFX guys were doing all their rough cuts, etc on PPro...where the integration with the suite for Photoshop and AE was an advantage.

The Mercury Playback Engine will cause a lot of users to give PPro a second look as rendering varied files on the timeline is still a reality in FCP no matter what sort of machine you're running it on. The feedback and response of this new feature (on a system with a high end display card) makes PPro act more like a Smoke than any other software-based NLE...however, will it grab more drama/feature work because of this capability? Definitely a question.

Color...that is definitely an area where Adobe needs to have an answer. Possibly most frustrating is that they have the technology in-house with Photoshop and AE and the color correction technology that exists in pieces throughout PPro. Somewhere in there they could construct something credible... I'm an Iridas SpeedGrade user myself, but there is no question that for color correction included in an NLE, Color is the most advanced option right now.

Shake...I get mixed signals on Shake. AE continues to advance (some users like what they're doing, some don't...the same as everything else), and Shake hasn't made much noise since about a year or two after it was acquired.

Cinema Tools are a nice feature that Adobe doesn't have an answer for...

Audio-wise, Adobe's Soundbooth was developed at a time when they decided to try to create a "Motion" for sound...by that I mean a simplified application that video editors wouldn't be intimidated by...I think Soundtrack probably has some advantage against it, but Premiere Pro has audio capabilities on the timeline that include sample-based temporal unit capability on the audio tracks in the video edit timeline (still the only NLE to have it...the audio portion of PPro being developed by two very nice guys who came from DigiDesign...), which trumps any other NLE and the audio feature set inside of PPro makes leaving PPro for many simple audio manipulations unnecessary. Adobe Audition is a DAW which is available separately from the suite (but still has a roundtrip capability with PPro), and we migrated from ProTools to Audition a handful of years ago and haven't been sorry.

Motion...lots of quick presets for quick titles and very tactile effect creation...video editors don't feel as if they have to immerse themselves in another discipline to make it work...mission accomplishedl. I do enough VFX work in AE that it doesn't intimidate me and I see limitations in repeatability for a non-math based compositing/MoGFX tool, so for me, Motion wouldn't be all that compelling...


Competition is a good thing, and at this time, the fact remains that any freelance editor needs to know Avid and FCP.

However, I think that Adobe is worth watching for those of you who may have written them off. The feature set debate tends to be workflow specific and isn't as one-sided as the current market share figures may imply....the very near future looks quite interesting.

Arguments about which is 'better' are unwinnable as both sides are convinced they are right. I think the fact remains that your workflow and your market dynamics are the key factors in any decision of this type. However, the assertion that any NLE "can't" do a certain type of work is usually too general to be meaningful.