Premier or Final Cut Pro/Avid?

[webdesignerla70]

I hope I am in the right place with my post. Hello group!

I recently started to learn Premier Pro and I totally fell in love with it! My main goal with Premier pro was a dream to work in the film industry to create/edit cool videos, music clips and even films...

Well, I talked to my friends filmmakers today... It turned out nobody use Premier in a professional film industry, everybody uses Final Cut Pro (Ma) or Avid (PC).

I wonder why Premier is not as popular as those two programs? Is there anyone who work with both Premier and Avid/Final Cut Pro? What's the difference? What Premier doesn't have that other two programs have?

Another question: if I work in Premier with this film footage for this guy and later he wants to make some changes... Can he make them with Final Cut Pro or the changes needs to be made only with Premier?

Thank you!

[guns1inger]

I can think of a few reasons

1. Stability. Premiere, until very recently, simply was not stable enough to use in a production environment.

2. Power. When Avid was happily chewing through 2k footage, Premiere was still struggling to work with DV nicely.

3. Infrastructure. Avid, in a professional environment, is part of a chain. It is also part of suite of systems tailored for different duties. There are version of Avid designed for new editing, which are different to those that edit movies or regular TV. These tie back to server and storage infrastructure.

You can edit video in any editor. However if you edit in Premiere, and you friend decides he wants something different, he can only edit the finished footage in FCP. He cannot load your project up and make ground level changes. So if he decides he wants, for a example, a different transition, he would have to cut out the old one and create a new one, losing several seconds of footage. This could throw off the timing of a scene, or destroy a transition completely.

[filmboss80]

Guns1inger, I couldn't have answered that question any better! Yes, it's a workflow issue in the film and TV industry, and Avid is king, although I see more and more folks going the Final Cut Pro route also. Most people who frequent this site don't deal much with 2k and 4k footage, and they don't go through intermediary steps (color correction, music scoring, ADR, sfx, etc., etc., etc.) with various post houses.

For projects that stay primarily in-house (with acquisition footage primarily in the DV format), Premiere is just fine and dandy. It's not my favorite, but I still use it quite often, as I have collected a number of third-party plugins and tweaks that still work with the newer versions. It also plays well with AE. Most of all, it runs on a PC, and I can build powerful workstations for the fraction of the price of Macs. (I am, after all, a film BOSS, so I have to keep a sharp eye on capital equipment expenditures -- especially in this economy.)

[webdesignerla70]

Thank you so much, guys!

[edDV]

My main goal with Premier pro was a dream to work in the film industry to create/edit cool videos, music clips and even films...

If you want to work in their facilities with their equipment, then AVID is entrenched. Disadvantage for AVID is the cost to buy and support your own system and limited use outside core film business (some TV stations use it).

Final Cut Pro is the choice for post house and freelance work. Downside is high cost of the Studio Suite unless you are a student. You can start with Final Cut Express.

Premiere is widely used in corp/government media, and ad houses locked into the Adobe Suite for cross media development.

Independent producers tend to use Final Cut or Sony Vegas. Vegas is popular for one man band production to finished product without needing to buy and learn a large suite.