Posted on Jun 17, 2009


I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool FCP cutter for about nine years. Until yesterday, I felt like I had good reason not to seriously consider other NLE’s. Vegas? Not powerful enough. AVID? Clunky and temperamental. Premiere? Nothing but a passing fancy to a Mac user.

Then I got a load of an eye-opening demo of CS4′s Premiere by Adobe’s Dave Helmly. And you know what? I’m willing to make a pronouncement–as of today, hands down, it looks like it kicks FCP’s ass all-over the playground in terms of functionality.

I don’t want to shill for Adobe, but there’s just too many features and interoperabilities to ignore. It basically plays with everything, including native MXF, Red, and XDCam footage. Well, you can read the hype yourself, but I’ll say, I saw it all laid out on an active timeline, and even though Dave was running a screamer (16 core, 16gb RAM, some ridiculous graphics card) there was no rendering or untoward noticable lag at all.

When Dave did a transcode, he brought up Apple’s system monitor, and there were active processes taking place on all 16 nodes, FCP doesn’t take advantage of threaded processing power yet.

Of particular interest to me was the “speech transcription” feature. Dave pulled up a clip and using this function, Premiere created a searchable transcription of the clip. This is a function Avid has been touting with its latest releases, and given that a former Avid developer recently joined the Adobe team, it’s not surprising to see a similar capability in Premiere. Apparently, that dude brought his bag-of-tricks with him.

I hate to say it, but I think I’ve–finally–got another NLE to learn.

And I hope Apple gets off its ass and has a major upgrade with its next FCP release, come on y’all, you done started this wing-ding, don’t get left holding the slop bucket now that some other cooks have moved into the kitchen and are pushing out some tasty features.

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