finally making the jump to video editing

cool, i was hoping Premiere would be an answer.  I use the Adobe Suite daily at work, so i'm already fairly familiar with the interface. 

stoked to finally be able to put video to some of my music....plus, anything that might get me out of "proposal monkey" role at work can't be a bad thing.

Thanks

I've had a play with Avid and got lost pretty quick. I mainly use Final Cut Pro (7 not X), but before I switched to OS X, Premiere was my choice. It has a nice, straight forward interface and the integration with other CS products is fantastic. I did find replacing clips with After Effects compositions to be a little finicky, but I probably wasn't doing it right.

I can't say I've ever used Vegas, but I've heard quite a lot of good things.

You say you quite like FCP, have you ever thought of building a Hackintosh? I've had mine built for a fair few months now and it hasn't given me any problems whatsoever.

Hmmm, will have to investigate that then, I'm most familiar with using Premiere so it would be nice to stick with it (also I just really dislike Apple and their proprietary format bullshit, and lack of proper blu-ray support, and complete nerfing of Final Cut.....ya I basically dislike Apple).

Premiere doesn't wanna mess with that shit, to put it shortly.

You'll need to rip them into something more real.

What I do is Google for "free [xxx] converter," where [xxx] is whatever random ass file extension you're working with. Premiere will like AVIs more than MOVs or MPGs, but all of those technically work.

MPEGStreamclip covers a lot of formats and is a good general purpose transcoder, but depending on your specific codec, you may need something specific.

Adobe Media Encoder (may not come with Premiere Automatically, idk, perhaps only when you buy one of the suites.) It can usually handle formats that Premiere itself won't want to use, and convert them as desired.

Righto! Just the kind of research I was referring to, high five.

Last edited by paulou (2012-03-09 09:35:02)

Premiere isn't the greatest thing in the world at exporting. FCP is amazing at it, as is Vegas... as a Premiere guy, I feel your pain.

Honestly, what I tend to do is finish my edit and then import the Premiere project into After Effects to render.

Exporting at a highish quality and then opening it in Quicktime Pro (thirty bucks, if you don't have a license or a way of getting one) gives you all the export options in the world for compressing and keeping your quality.

Play with the Adobe Media Encoder. It's full of presets.

I actually like FCPX. It serves my purposes well, other than the fact that my graphics card doesn't let me get realtime playback, even when using proxy footage... But my computer is a bit outdated. It's an absolute basic MacBook Pro configuration from 2009. Not really the program's fault.

I don't care about backwards compatibility at all. The program was completely rewritten from the ground up, and there are functions in 7 that just don't match up with X, so it's totally understandable to me. It's something for a 3rd party developer to take a crack at, and they have. Good enough for me.

Premiere is great because it talks nicely with other Adobe apps like AE and Audition. FCPX has taken a step backwards in that regard, but it's taken a huge leap forward in terms of the interface and ease of use IMO. I work quicker in X than I do in 7. Especially with stuff like b-roll, where you can assign key words to ranges of clips and stuff like that. And having thumbnails like that in the browser is really convenient. I'm no longer just clicking on a random file name to see if it's the one I'm looking for, or if there's something I can use. Now it's all there in front of me.

I personally don't need Apple to do much else with it, other than a few bug fixes, and switchable windows would be really nice. Of course professionals have many more needs than I do, but personally, I like it. I just hope 3rd party plugin developers don't abandon it!