Recently, David Dessel described his personal reasons for moving his work from Final Cut Pro to Adobe Premiere Pro. You can watch his presentation and learn about what factors motivated his transition here:
“Confessions of a switcher, with David Dessel”
If you want to learn more about Adobe Premiere Pro, check out these resources:
- Premiere Pro resources for Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer users
- FAQ: How do I learn Premiere Pro?
In his presentation, David touched on several important features in Premiere Pro. Here are links to additional information about each:
- details about the Mercury Playback Engine, CUDA, and what they mean for Premiere Pro
- RED (R3D) source settings and features
- rendering previews (and what the red, yellow, and green render bars really mean)
- color keying with the Ultra Key effect
- animating position and scale of clips, including still images
- Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects
- Warp Stabilizer for stabilizing handheld shots
- color correction and grading
- integration with Audition for audio work
- using Adobe Media Encoder
- working with Final Cut Pro projects in Premiere Pro
- multicam (multiple camera) workflow
- using Encore for DVD and Blu-ray Disc export
- making feature requests
There’s one segment in David’s presentation that requires some clarification: When someone asked why it took a long time to render segments that were dynamically linked to After Effects, David suggested using an Nvidia CUDA card to speed things up. However, After Effects doesn’t use CUDA for any rendering operations, so this wouldn’t help. The reason that dynamically linked After Effects compositions take a longer time to render in Premiere Pro than they do in After Effects is because the headless version of After Effects that serves the dynamically linked data is only a single process; it can’t use the multiprocessing features that After Effects can use when it’s running as the full application. In such cases, where you aren’t getting real-time playback that you need in Premiere Pro, it can make sense to render out an intermediate file from After Effects. You shouldn’t need to do this all the time, but it can be useful when the After Effects composition is especially demanding.