Mac Attack

[justintfirefly]

Gore, I told Trioxin the same thing. MOST big business' are probably going to use linux and just train the employees how to run a certain program. However, if you're going to operate a computer at a business, they're most likely going to go windows. They're not going to waste money on training people to use an OS that they're not already familiar with. Ala, MAC and Linux. They're not going to buy Mac's because they're more expensive, yet they lack specs-wise.

I'm actually quite curious about Final Cut Pro. I use After Effects and Premiere. Both of those are bad ass. Can any of you whom have had experience with Final Cut Pro compare that to the Adobe progs? I'm interested.

Sure!

I have a degree in videography and editing. I was taught on solely the Adobe Creative Suite, so I was force to be fairly well rounded with After Effects and Premiere. Both are great programs, especially AE. After Effects is used by a TON of indie film makers for their special effects, and often times is listed in a lot of Hollywood crap. I haven't gotten to use After Effects a whole lot, mostly because the crack for the rest of my Creative Suite doesn't work for my After Effects and I haven't been able to find a patch for it. My iMac at work doesn't have it either because the CS4 that we bought didn't come with it. For the little bit of special effects I do now, I use mostly Apple Motion, which comes with the Final Cut Pro Studio. I can't say if it's better or worse than AE because I'm still fairly new at it, however, I'll have to say that right now it does seem a little more limited than AE, but this may be just because I don't know much about it. It is very easy to move things around in 3-D space, however, and comes with a great assortment of templates that are easily editable to hide their "templateness". One more thing about After Effects: I read in an official review yesterday that the CS5 that's coming out includes an AE with a rotoscoping brush! It may not work worth a crap, but it certainly sounds beautiful!

Okay, Adobe Premiere. If you're wanting to edit something semi-professionally and make it look 100x better than Windows Movie Maker, then Premiere is actually just fine. I haven't used it since CS2 was out, but from what I remember, it was a tad bit tedious and was difficult to separate your left and right audio tracks. All of your transitions have to be dragged and dropped in, which isn't a hassle, really, but stay tuned...I thought the exporting was a little bit of a pain in the ass as well until you learn all you can about customizable encoding, which I didn't when I first learned Premiere. Final Cut Pro has a fairly similar UI, so that doesn't take any getting used to, but it offers tools that are less confusing and more helpful. For starters, you can open as many "sequences" in the same project as you want and they hang around in tabbed format on the timeline. This has probably changed, but I don't recall Premiere doing this. Final Cut also has a built in audio mixer than you can adjust while the audio track is playing, which is extremely helpful if you have music playing behind your video's audio track. Color correction is really easy to manipulate and alter, again with live preview results. I remember the chroma keying working pretty nice with Premiere, and it's just as nice with Final Cut, allowing you to add a drop shadow to what you keyed to give a little more depth. All of the same annoying transitions are included like the wipe and the block spin thing, but since you really shouldn't be using these anyway, they're all hidden away in a menu. You can specify a "favorite" transition (I think it's cross-fade by default) and you just have to right click on the end of the piece you want to crossfade (or between the two pieces) and you'll have the option to assign "cross-fade" to that selection. Much, MUCH easier than dragging and dropping a transition, mostly because I often "dropped" it in the wrong place. By default, Final Cut exports as .mov, but it's very VERY easy to export to around 10-12 other formats, including Premiere's famous AVI and a still image (.png) and it works rather quickly, assuming it's a basic video. Export is sometimes slow if you've added a lot of keying or color correction.

One more thing I dig about Premiere: The export to DVD function, Final Cut doesn't have this that I'm aware of, and I've worked with it since college.

One more thing I dig about Final Cut: the keyboard shortcuts actually make sense. (a is arrow, z is zoom etc. )

Like with most software programs, this is just a matter of personal preference. And it has nothing to do with me being a Mac only guy now, but after I used Final Cut and got used to the interface, I quit using Premiere completely.

I know this wasn't a terribly exhaustive review of either program, but it will at least give you an idea of what you wanted to learn about. Hope it helps!