As far as features and usability goes, Premiere Pro is very similar to Final Cut Pro. Adobe even published a PDF (upon the release of CS4) called Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 for users of Apple Final Cut Pro (here’s a pdf link) and it’s a nice read if you’re curious. You have a main project window where sequences, bins, media and elements are kept. You make new sequences based on source media and can have mixed formats, resolutions and frame rates in a single project and single timeline. You can load multiple timelines at once via tabs but you can’t open multiple projects. It’s more like Avid Media Composer in that sense.
PPro is also very drag and drop friendly if that’s your cup of edit tea but can be controlled via customizable keyboard shortcuts as well. You can click, drag, move and trim via direct mouse manipulation of all types of clips in the timeline. There are keyframeable overlays that allow of the adjustment of motion, opacity, and time remapping parameters right in the timeline. Filters and effects can be stacked onto a clip and the manipulated via keyframes in a tab in the Source (read: Viewer) monitor.
Every clip has “built-in” motion parameters that can be animated via a double click to load the clip into the Source monitor or by choosing those parameters with an overlay option directly in the timeline. Multiple clips can also be nested into one just like FCP nesting and than nest can be effected and keyframes just like a regular clip. Effects can be dragged and dropped right onto clips in the timeline. Sections of a sequence, or entire sequences, can be sent to other applications as well.
One complaint I’ve heard from FCP users about PPro is that the interface is too confusing and cluttered. It’s true that there’s a lot of stuff going on when you look around the screen and certain aspects of the space could be better utilized. But a common FCP complaint is that the FCP interface needs a more modern update. PPro’s interface is a modern interface and seemingly infinitely customizable. You can tear off and move around both panes and panels to create pretty much any layout you might want and then save that as a custom layout. Like FCP, Adobe has included a number of layout presets as well. You can also change the overall darkness of the PPro interface color so if you prefer it to be light you can save that as well. While it’s not as customizable as Media Composer, with it’s ability to change colors, fonts, font size, button shapes and shading, PPRo is way more customizable than FCP in the interface department.
There are a few areas where FCP and the Final Cut Studio still triumph. One would be multicam editing. While PPro features a multicam option that really seems convoluted (just read this online help file) in its application and there is no grouping of clips (or multiclips as FCP calls it) which is a must for most serious music video editors. Final Cut Studio does include Silicon Color’s Apple’s powerful color grading application Color. PPro does have it’s own built-in 3-way color correction with secondaries (as well as quite a few other color correction tools) and it has quite a lot of parameters. To be honest I haven’t quite figured it out yet. You could add Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse
as a 3-party grading option and even get a dedicated control surface with their Colorociter™ Colorist’s Workstation so there is an option although it’s an expensive one.
While Premiere Pro CS5 does an amazing job of handling many, if not most, file formats natively (something that can’t be said of FCP or Media Composer) Adobe is missing a high-quality, compressed HD codec that can serve as a central codec that lots of different source formats can be transcoded to in order to give the editor a single working format. This might be opposite the Adobe philosophy of handling most everything natively but as an editor I think there would still be a comfort factor (not to mention a performance factor) that a common editing and mastering format would bring to the big edit job that uses a little bit of everything. Think Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD but for Adobe. And imagine if this codec was Mercury optimized! To me the obvious solution would be Cineform since Cineform has had a nice integration with Premiere Pro on the PC side for quite a while. Adobe should license Cineform (or maybe just buy it outright) and make that the Adobe HD format of choice across the board in all Adobe applications, both on the PC and the Mac.
Premiere Pro also needs a more robust way in which to relink file in a project back to missing media. It’s very FCP-like in the way that it manages media in that clips in the project link to wherever those clips live on your hard drive. You’re faced with a reconnection box in the event that it can’t relink to media and there is the option of skipping the clips or offlining the clips:
As you can see from the image above you have some options when relinking media but I haven’t found an option to have PPro CS5 automatically search the drive. This might be especially frustrating if you are linking to native mxf media buried in a P2 or XDCAM file structure. It sends shivers up my spine to think about having to do that over and over and over again on a long-form project. It gives new meaning to playing the reconnection dance. I hope I’ve missed something vital in this part of the media management department.
It’s worth noting that you can’t open multiple projects as the same time. On the one hand this is something that FCP editors often do (me included) and might be missed when editing on PPro. On the other hand, as an Avid editor too, I’ve never really felt this limitation as being particularly painful in all of my years editing on Avid. Media Composer will allow you to open bins from other projects so that helps. A work-around might be to keep your media very organized at the hard desk level so you could seek out other media and drag into an open PPRo project but you probably do that anyway right? That doesn’t help if you want to open an edit sequence though or if you are editing certain native media formats, like RED.
At this point in the long life of Premiere I think Adobe is now in a position where they need to convert editors to their platform to really gain marketshare. While Premiere Pro could be an easy choice for a solo editor’s entry into the business or strong choice for a self-contained corporate video department the question has to be asked: Can Premiere Pro function as a replacement for Final Cut Pro or Media Composer? Yes and no. As strong as this version of Premiere Pro is there’s several things that I noticed that might make the transition a bit more difficult.
One simple thing that would help any new editor coming from another application would be a visual keyboard map. While you can customize the Premiere Pro keyboard it’s done via a very clunky list-based interface rather than a visual top-down map. You can’t imagine how frustrating this is until you try to figure the keyboard out. Whenever I work with a new piece of software I always try the default keyboard settings first. I ended up printing out an image from one of the editing keyboard manufacturers that I could reference to see what keys were where. It’s not that the default setup is bad, it’s sort of a cross between the FCP mnemonic keyboard device and Avid’s more edit-centric one, it’s just that there’s no easy way to see it and change it. Smartly, Adobe does include two keyboard mappings geared toward both the Avid and FCP user. Dumbly, those mappings are still named for older or dead versions of their competing products (at least they were on this beta version):
Once an experienced Avid or FCP editor gets into Premiere Pro CS5’s core editing functionality it’s just some little things you will miss: you can reveal a clip in a bin via the Reveal in Project command in the timeline but not the Source monitor. I can’t seem to find a way to mark a clip via IN to OUT points with a keystroke. Markers play a very strong role in PPro but I can’t seem to find any kind of Marker list view where you can see all the markers placed in a timeline along with their comments. The Trim Monitor doesn’t allow for any kind of realtime, or dynamic as FCP calls it, trimming while playing back or JKL scrubbing the timeline.
You also can’t click on a clip in the PPro timeline and correspondingly see that clip selected by some type of bounding box in the Record monitor (read: Canvas), such as when you have multiple picture in pictures and want to move one around ... or at least I couldn’t figure it out. You can click on the image in the Record monitor window and select it there but if you have a lot of layers then you often have to click the clip in the timeline. While not a deal breaker this would be very helpful especially when you have the ability for such realtime performace with hardware acceleration.
There’s two other things that Adobe has to overcome to gain editing marketshare with PPro CS5. One is perception. There are many who have experienced a lot of instability with PPro over the years. Frequent crashing, especially on exiting the program, wasn’t uncommon. I can’t say how well PPro would handle, or has ever handled, the massive amounts of organization and media that longform editing work requires but you don’t hear about PPro being used much in features so there must be a reason why.
The second hurdle faced by PPro is the Apple-fanboyism that many Final Cut Pro users posses and that no matter how bad FCP gets or how good the competition gets they won’t change since the competing product isn’t made by Apple. IMHO PPro CS5 is very, very similar to FCP (and it’s overall performance has really jumped ahead) in both operation and functionality. There are many type of jobs that it is more than qualified for and would handily beat FCP in speed, feature and usability. Adobe just has to convince those FCP users and be sure the application is stable. In the testing I did with the beta version is was much more stable than CS4 but time will tell as it’s use more extensively by all users.
That said, if you have never worked on another NLE before and PPro CS5 is your first editor then you will probably be very happy. Will Adobe gain new editors with PPro CS5? Yes. Will they convert a slew of FCP and Avid editors? Not without a lot of work and some good marketing. Could I find use in my editor’s toolbox for this new version of Premiere Pro? Most definitely. And I didn’t even mention some of the other aspects of the Adobe suite as a whole like audio transcription, full 64-bit support and memory sharing across the suite and the After Effects CS5 Roto brush. And there’s still the new Premiere Pro CS5 features like Face Detection (!), CS Review integration, OnLocation CS5 integration, Ultra keyer, a “revamped” Adobe Media Encoder, improved native RED .R3D support ... really a lot to discover here. It will take some time.
Thanks for your writeup, Scott.
I’d say from your story, that Premiere Pro deserves another look from Final Cut Pro editors. Performance is tops.
Personally, I think Premiere Pro’s biggest obstacle is the User Interface. I know, that sounds kinda trivial. But I like to start fresh, with a “blank canvas” so to speak. Less is more.
Hey, maybe in the future we video editors will start a project with a blank white page, and add only the tools/ windows we actually need.
-Andrew
Posted by aburke on 04/12 at 11:46 AM
@ dorus - thanks for the info on opening a project inside a project. Exactly how do you do this? I can’t belive I missed it but hope I did. I’ll ask at the adobe booth too. I plan to try the multicam but it seemed very convoluted but that many be that I’m thinking more traditional multicam workflow.
@ aburke - FCP is very lacking these days. Both Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer 5.0 are way ahead. I’m looking for the best tool for my job and not loyalty to one company. Viva updates and better workflow!
Posted by Scott Simmons on 04/14 at 09:56 AM
“you can reveal a clip in a bin via the Reveal in Project command in the timeline but not the Source monitor.”
Sure you can, M to match frame from timeline will serve as the F key in FCP. Been there since CS3.
“I can’t seem to find a way to mark a clip via IN to OUT points with a keystroke”
Again it is there: / key will mark a selected clip/s IN/OUT points. Then there is Shift+/ for the same Mark Clip feature as in FCP. These feature keys have been in since CS3 and CS4 respectively.
“You also can’t click on a clip in the PPro timeline and correspondingly see that clip selected by some type of bounding box in the Record monitor (read: Canvas), such as when you have multiple picture in pictures and want to move one around ... “
It is there just done differently: In a PIP seq selecting clips in the Program Monitor will show bounding box and allow movement, scale… If you have layered overlapping clips then select the clip in the timeline, select the motion parameter in Effect Control Panel, bounding box appears in Program Monitor, proceed to manipulate. Sounds long but is only a small shift in process.
BTW. I do agree on your comments about the keyboard shortcuts layout interface.
- Cheers, Jon Barrie 
Posted by Jon Barrie on 04/14 at 05:46 PM
Scott,
The first line of your article says:
“As far as features and usability goes, Premiere Pro is very similar to Final Cut Pro.”
But you responded to my comment with:
“FCP is very lacking these days.”
Am I right to assume there’s a typo in there?
Posted by aburke on 04/14 at 06:01 PM
@Jon - thanks for the specifics on those keyboard shortcuts for editing. It’s great to see them there as they are very much needed. I don’t think they were apparent as I searched both help and dug through the keyboard layouts looking for that feature. I think that’s important when an editor moves to another platform in that it has to be easy to search out common things. They keyboard shortcuts need to be easier to search and figure out.
@aburke - No type. FCP is very lacking compared to PPro CS5 and Avid MC 5. But other features (stuff not introed in 5) and usability between FCP and PPro is similar. Just look at how your manipulate the timeline, apply and keyframe effects, use the “Viewer” tabs etc. Basic editing functions are very similar. That can’t be denied.
Posted by Scott Simmons on 04/15 at 10:44 AM
well, this article doesn’t show all the pros of PPRO.. for example one of things I love about PPRO is the instant search in the effects window.. non in FCP..
adobe is marketing premiere pro not as standalone application.. its a part of the best tools around the world.. when using PPRO you have instant access to PS, AE, etc.. and not to mention performance when going these apps..
What FCP gives you from timesavings in the era of speedy file lookup and timecode sync and other stuff will be lost in file conversion and intermediate rendering between apps.. which is real issue blocking your creativity.. it just turns your life into fragments of waiting periods for the render line to finish..
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/16 at 04:38 AM
@ Mohammed - True, this article wasn’t a full on review but rather early impressions as an Avid/FCP editor cut some short projects on the application.
@ Jon - I stopped by the Adobe booth to get some clarification on some of these issues I had and I stand by what I said in the article. M is match frame but the command I am looking for is to reveal the matched frame clip in the bin from the Source monitor. You can Reveal in Project via right+click in the timeline but you can’t do that to a clip in the Source monitor .... that I can find.Maybe there’s a keyboard shortcut but who knows since it’s so hard to find them! Adobe knows this and I’d expect to see a searchable keyboard shortcut box in an update. At least I hope.
Good call on the / key but that only half works. You have to click on the clip in the timeline and then hit the / key to mark it as IN to OUT. If your playhead is sitting on the clip you can then hit shift+/ and that will mark it IN to OUT without selecting it first .. but then you can’t delete or copy or cut that clip between the IN and OUT points, you have to still click it to select it in the timeline. Maybe there is a keyboard stroke that will select the clip between an IN and OUT point. Either way PPro is requiring me to grab the mouse and click the timeline to select the clip, a major fail for very fast, keyboard-centric editing. Same with the PIP, extra mouse click to achieve a basic task. While I dig PPro CS5 there’s little basic editing frustrations that still exist IMHO that would make it tough to use daily, especially on longform programs where I am doing lots of cuts and dissolves only.
Posted by Scott Simmons on 04/16 at 07:32 AM
@Scott. Just because fcp does things a certain way doesn’t mean it has to be adhered to by other NLE systems.
Reveal in project is only from a selected clip in the time line. In CS5 they have added this function to the shortcut listing, u need to set it yourself. This still can do with some work but the option is not totally lost to
mouse only operations.
As for setting in out points and deleting or removing with cut there is the lift : or extract ; keys Which store the lifted or extracted section between the in out point in the clipboard for pasting. Lift will leave a gap whereas extract will lift and ripple delete effectively closing whatever gap was made. This is an Avid workflow not FCP.
Before you trash an app make sure you know understand it instead of looking for the same operations as another product. Granted there are things adobe users would still like to see come into premiere pro but on the whole many of your comments are simply pre-informed and assumed making them invalid.
Jon
Posted by Jon Barrie on 04/16 at 08:07 AM
@scott You make 1 extra mouse click sound like the en of days. What about time waste waiting for rewrapping to QT every single tapeless format. I think a couple of clicks here and there are still not going to fill that time.
If you prefer FCP great. I work with both and would love to see them have functions from each other but that’s not reality.
I’m unsure where your rants are supposed to take the article, but I hope you feel they are informative.
An oldie but a goody, a good tradesman never blames his tools.
Posted by Jon Barrie on 04/16 at 08:13 AM
@ Jon - great call on the lift, extract when marked IN to OUT, works great. That is very Avid like.
I’m not trashing the app at all just pointing out little workflow items that I as a 10 year editor who work in both FCP and Avid on a daily basis rely on to get work done efficiently. NLE apps too often concentrate on flashy features an not small workflow issues, like saving mouse clicks. 1 extra mouse click isn’t the end of days until you have to reach for that mouse and click and do that single operation thousands of times over the course of a long edit. Not to mention years of long edits. That ads up IMHO when it could easily be mapped to a single keystroke, which if could if the programmers did it. I think that’s what they often want to hear, constructive criticism of their app so they can make it better. At least that’s what the Adobe guy told me at the booth. I’m not blaming the tool in any way, shape or form, just pointing out how it could be better. Software could always be better.
Case in point your comment on FCP and it’s rewrapping to QT. I 100% agree and that’s been a common FCP complaint of mine for a long time, well documented on my articles. FCP could play native media of Apple so chooses, they just choose not to. FCP has lots of issues like this. It needs help. It’s great to see Adobe helping PPro and I think they will continue. Thanks for the comments btw!
Posted by Scott Simmons on 04/16 at 08:21 AM
@ Scott as always it’s hard to “read” commentary in text as there is not inflection. Therefore it may appear more negative than intended. Thanks for your response.
From my understanding of FCP architecture the media must be QT compliant. And the money spent on developing Prores = no time soon will they ever run native.
At the end of the day, if I can get cutting, work stable, learn as many shortcut keys possible and get it out with quality my clients are happy. If they are happy I am happy. FCP or Ppro doesn’t make a difference to me. Mercury has certainly raised the bar.
Cheers. jon
Posted by Jon Barrie on 04/16 at 04:00 PM
“FCP is very lacking compared to PPro CS5 and Avid MC 5.”
You mean the mid-2009 version of FCP is behind the future, not-yet-released versions of PP and MC? :O)
At least Steve Jobs has said officially (a few weeks ago) that FCP will see a rocking release this year. No details as usual, but on the rare occasions that he opens his mouth he tends to be authoritative.
One question re the Premier Pro linking with After Effects, etc.
When this was first shown on Adobe’s launch tour, I was very impressed, but it soon seemed to work better for demo projects than for large real-life projects, and I found that many people had had that experience.
Can the linking feature be expected to work for any size project now, thanks to better memory handling perhaps?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/27 at 01:59 PM
Thanks for this review.
Personally, I have lusted most for smooth multi-cam in PPro. It’s always been clunky for me but at least it’s been usable and far easier than not having it at all.
I could have upgraded to a faster system to improve that somewhat but with 64bit looming I just decided to wait it out until PPro was 64bit. Then I started hearing about Mercury and wanted to see some system builds and see more compatible GPU cards hit the market. I believe Mercury and 64bit will be a big boon to PPro’s multicam users. I hope you’ll take a closer look at this function and cover it in terms of what it takes in horsepower to really utilize it. I hear that it’ll handle four simultaneous 4K Red streams! At what cost in MOBO, CPU, GPU and RAM?
As a devoted Cineform user, I was only frustraded by the lack of multicam functionality within a Cineform project. I spoke to Cineform about it and was informed that Adobe had closed off that section of their API to outside developers.
In retrospect, I guess that was probably due to Adobe knowing that secretly had Mercury up its sleeve and that would solve the multi-cam problem.
I agree with your observations re Cineform. Even if Adobe has answered the call re Mercury solving the multi-cam performance issue, I still think there is a lot of compelling benefits in Cineform. Most notable to me: boosting 8bit video to 10 bit, and the integration of Firstlight non-destructive color correction.
Cineform users have not been lacking for realtime editing of multi streams on 32bit PCs that are not cutting edge screamers, and indeed on many a mainstream 32bit portable with only 4GB of RAM. I don’t imagine Adobe has obviated the utility of Cineform’s intermediate codec with Mercury for the above reasons. And, given the undeniable utility of Cineform I’ve never really understood why there’s always seemed to be so so little mindshare and much resistance to transcoding to a codec that wasn’t ‘native’. I got over it a long time ago, much to my benefit.
I agree that Adobe should license Cineform and incorporate it deeply. PPro’s ability to handle HDV - and nowadays, HD up to 1080x1920 - in realtime, was after all, due to Adobe’s licensing of Cineform technology. That is possible due to the Cineform plugin installation replacing Adobes processing pipeline with Cineform’s pipeline (in a Cineform project of course).
On the other hand from what I understand about Cineform it doesn’t seem like they are exactly in a desperate situation; they are a highly respected and visible company with some truly high-level technology geniuses.
Adobe should license Cineform or develop their own wavelet-based codec to achieve the same ends as you (and I) hope for re a standard, default HD codec. The Mercury Engine powering a wavelet codec could be the ‘be-all-and-end-all’ solution to real ‘realtime-all-the-time’.
My other ‘fanboyism’ is about Blackmagic Design. They’ve had some interesting product intros at NAB too and I’m sure they’ll be reviewed here.
BMD is and has been quite compatibly integrated with PPro, AE, etc. And Cineform has been quite compatible with BMD and gave us live HDMI capture to Cineform’s uncompressed 10bit codec.
BMD’s Intensity Pro gave me inexpensive component I/O and great realtime HDMI monitoring to my Sony pro production monitor. Maybe,ultimately, it’ll be 64bit/Mercury and BMD that solves the muti-cam problem.
Again, I hope you really explore this important aspect.
Thanks!
Posted by wsmith on 05/01 at 09:24 AM
