IMO, PP for short form work and MC for long form work. Premiere is great for its integration with After Effects. FCP was good for a while, but that moment’s gone. The source code was old, and the outdated architecture meant that there were a lot of camera formats that required long hours transcoding or getting them into the QT wrapper. FCP’s media management is okaaay… Nothing fantastic.
MC is probably the only tool with a managed media workflow, where once you set your media creation settings, everything is managed for you and you don’t have to bat an eyelid. Shot on XDCAM EX? AMA it and start editing. When you have time at the end of the day, consolidate it into Avid media and Avid will manage the media properly. That’s one step faster than FCP. And the consolidating media is fast. For long form, MC is robust. Probably the most robust and stable tool around. If I was working in long form now, I’d cut on an Avid.
PPro… PPro is still a little quirky. Send a clip to After Effects, hit cancel and you get an error message. There is no real time trimming function (or maybe I haven’t found it yet). But otherwise, it is fast, powerful, natively supports many camera formats without transcoding, and it integrates easily with After Effects. And After Effects is the swiss army knife of desktop editing. If you don’t have After Effects, get it.
Do you need a graphics card with CUDA? Maybe. Or maybe not. This is a breakdown of the Mercury playback engine, straight from the horse’s mouth:
http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html
For me, maybe not. From what I can see, CUDA does not decode those 8 angles of multicam H.264 files from the DSLR. It does effects, and I am not heavy on effects. So yea, for short form work with the client bringing in all kinds of footage, PPro rules.
Where does that put FCP? With its aging architecture, and EOL status, it doesn’t put it much in good stead. FCP’s strongest apps have always been FCP and Color, both EOL’ed. Color is now replaced by the more powerful DaVinci Resolve for a low cost color corrector, and the DaVinci Resolve is scaleable in its use all the way up to to major motion pictures. Adobe also announced its acquisition of Iridas SpeedGrade. So that is a development we are all waiting for.
Motion? The version of Motion in FCS 3 was buggy, and when I had to do a project in Motion, I had to delete some effects after a while and re-apply it because the bezier handles disappeared on the mask, or Smoothcam won’t show me the sliders when I switched from “stabilize” to “smooth”. And I haven’t found a way to use groups like AE’s null object. And there is no adjustment layer like in After Effects or Avid.
The smoothcam feature in FCP 7 is broken. It doesn’t work properly on interlaced footage. At least not on my ProRes 1080i50 clips. Multicam is buggy and relatively patchy, but it works. Try exporting a multicam project to XML and re-importing it back into FCP. Something is screwy, so you may not be able to use XML based workflows such as ClipFinder to wrangle your multicam clips shot on RED. FCP’s interface is marginally better for effects work than Avid MC, although MC has SpectraMatte which is a better keyer than the built in chroma key in FCP, and MC has Animatte and Paint and a tracker. Avid also has Fluid Motion, which is a motion compensated re-timer. FCP has been kept on life support for a while because the xml nature of the software left it very open to 3rd party developers.
FCP’s editing features was okay. Colored markers was a huge thing. And it beat Avid’s segment mode (FCP is always in segment mode), but FCP trimming tools were inferior to Avid’s.
A year ago, I would have said to wait for FCP X. Now the die is cast. As much as FCP X makes a good business model for Apple, targeting the dads-cutting-birthday-parties-for-their-kids market and hoping that market will have a trickle up effect to the pro market does not impress me at all. FCP X is a product with zero pro capabilities. It is buggy. It is buggier than FCP 7 ever was, and aside from the 64 bit architecture, I am not a huge fan of how the interface in FCP X works. Some like it (relatively few in the pro market), and the best anyone can say about it is that it is not ready yet.
If you own a post facility, a knee jerk reaction isn’t the best option, so you may want to stick with FCP 7 until you see sizeable benefits in other NLEs. And what sort of sizeable benefits? The amount of time you have to spend transcoding when the client brings you multicam footage shot on the DSLR, new tools, compatibility with new cameras, better editing features, lower cost of migrating to the next platform… Some of the features are there now- Avid MC announced support for AJA, BMD, Bluefish, and Matrox cards. PPro is fast with AVCHD formats. And these are two pretty good NLEs with features that FCP doesn’t even offer.
As an editor, start learning, because the sooner you know the workflow, the sooner you can earn your cash when everyone starts switching to MC or PP, the easier the transition then. Also, it doesn’t hurt to know more. I already bought both MC5.5 and Production Premium and I have been using MC at work for the last month.
