Playing with Premiere Pro CS5
Over the last few days I’ve been giving the 30 day demo of Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS5 a few workouts and I have to admit to being very impressed. The 30 day demo doesn’t come with many codecs so I could only work in DVCPRO HD sequences but that just made things even more interesting.
In Final Cut Pro if I create a similar sequence and then drag in some DSLR source clips things immediately become unresponsive. The timeline needs rendering and my mac struggles to play the sequence back. Adding any kind of transition or effect makes things a lot worse with rendering required at every stage.
Premiere Pro however handled the native DSLR footage with ease. I did a quick edit, dropped in some cross fades, applied some 3-way colour correction and a bit of blur here and there and not once did I have to render anything in order to watch it play back smoothly. Very impressive!
I must admit to being very tempted to splash out on a license but changing NLE’s is a very tough thing when you’ve gotten used to a specific workflow and I feel very at home with Final Cut. Seeing what Adobe has achieved just heightens my frustration with Apple for their apparent lack of advancement of the Pro apps and I’m definitely not going to keep plodding away in Final Cut for long knowing the competition is so far ahead.
Great write up Paul, I started video editing this past year and moved from Final Cut Express to Pro and now on to Adobe Premiere CS5 Pro (I work for a university hence the number of softwares). I too found Premiere to be a breath of fresh air especially with the native file handling, as I shoot on 7D its just so easy to render and work with. I also find Adobe to be more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing to work with.
Next up is trying to learn and integrate After effects.
Big fan of your blog look forward to new posts.
Paul,thanks for your thoughts on Premiere. I am still playing with it still and find that it handles my t2i files really well but it seems to be much harder to do simple tasks in Premiere. Perhaps there are shortcuts I have not learned yet. I know what you mean about switching from something you have gotten fast with. I am waiting for Sony to get back with me in responds to my video.
Dave
I’m a Final Cut Pro user who’s been thinking of trying the free trial as well, so was nice to read your review. I’m hoping Apple ships an update before the end of the year or I’ll consider learning Premier as well.
Have you tried After Effects? I’m curious to try the rotobrush tool to create the amazing still photo effects that are popping up in documentaries like “The Bill Hicks Story,” which blew me away at the Seattle Int’l Film Festival in June.
I invested in the CS4 master collection last year so I have used After Effects a couple of times although motion graphics isn’t something I’m very skilled at so I’ve not really played with it much.
Great write up Paul. I have been using Premiere for the last 3 years (I moved from FCP) and have been happy. I started with CS3 and currently use CS4. What you mentioned about being able to play footage without any rendering was a huge selling point for me.
On a side note, did you know that the main creator of FCP is the same person that created Premiere? Here is a link to the history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro#History
Thanks for the link Adam, very interesting read.