(or how I finally gave up and began to accept Premiere)
It has been more than 2 years since Apple announce FCPX. Many of us looked at it and decided to hold on to FCP 7 a little tighter. A bit of history (for me) about Premiere. Back in the mid to late 90s digital non-linear editing was just getting off the ground for those not able to afford the AVID. At school we had some crazy system with outboard capture cards and rendering and monitoring. At the heart of it was this program from a company that made Photoshop. Adobe Premiere. I don’t remember all the 3rd party stuff, I just remember the status bar saying “about a day” to render a 30 second clip. This is before mini-DV, but still very much Standard Definition. This had me running back to the film editing room where the Moviola hummed my name.
Shortly after that AVID became less expensive so I got some experience on that and it was great, but still a very specialized system. Then about 2 years later, Apple introduced Final Cut Pro. We had DV cameras, Firewire and an editing program that was cheap and worked. For about 10 years that was the case. And for many of us it has been 5 years since we’ve seen an update, but that’s ok, we’re still making it work.
Until today.
After getting a new machine and a new operating system things have come to an end. It wasn’t like a light switch turning off the program like an update of iTunes. (that is another horror story) Working on a project transcoding DSLR footage into FCP I thought it was strange that a couple of clips were very short. I hadn’t remembered turning off the camera like that. I quick check of the files and sure enough they were not transcoded correctly. Ok, new project, lets try again. Same result. We shot with 2 cameras, maybe just an issue there. Sure enough I found a couple files that weren’t right. That’s when it happened. Launch Adobe Premiere and import files. Set-up project and begin.
For all these years Premiere has gone through many changes and was thought of as second rate, not quite right, quirky. Well maybe it is, but for right now it works and is (so far) just as comfortable as FCP7.
