Rob Webster Creative Communication

Why I Use Adobe Premiere… On a Mac

// July 15th, 2010 // Video

So yeah, I’ll come clean. I use a Mac. I’m a professional video guy. I have Final Cut on my Mac. And I use Adobe Premiere.

Crazy, huh? Any other Mac users out there using Premiere? Show your faces. It’s okay. This is a safe place. You’ll be welcome here.

Premiere, why do I use thee? Let me count the ways…

First, comfort. I just switched to the glorious world of Mac a year and a half ago. So for a decade, I’ve used Premiere. I know the keyboard shortcuts. I know the idiosyncrasies. Apple doesn’t make a PC version of Final Cut, or I might have used it.

Second, Adobe Media Encoder. If you’ve never used it, it’s similar to Final Cut’s Compressor. Both programs let you take a timeline and send it to an external program to create whatever kind of end file you need. For instance, if I’ve edited a promo video for a sermon series, I need it in formats for our playback media server in the Sanctuary, a hi-rez H264 version for our remote venues, a Flash version for our website, and a version for YouTube/Social Media sites. So why do I like Adobe’s Media Encoder better? Easy. I can keep editing. When Compressor is, um, compressing, you can’t keep working in Final Cut. You have to wait. With Premiere, I can have a number of versions, videos, or timelines all open, and send as few or as many as I want to Media Encoder, which can then spit them out in as many formats as I need. And while it does all this, I can keep working in Premiere. It’s just better.

Third, titling. This is a no-brainer. To create text on the screen with Premiere, an overlay window comes up, and you use normal, familiar tools to lay out your text and formatting. And it’s WYSIWYG. Not so with Final Cut. You edit and work on the text in a separate, non-WYSIWYG tab. And then, maddeningly, any changes are global. You can’t change just one word to italic. No, it all has to be italic. You can work around it by creating a whole new text layer for your italic word, but seriously? For reals?

Fourth, integration with other Adobe apps. I love how easy it is to import and work with Photoshop files in Premiere. And it works great with After Effects, too. Adobe products do Dynamic Linking, meaning you can open up elements from one program to edit them in another. It’s a beautiful thing. Heck, After Effects will even directly open a Premiere project if you wanted to.

So that being said, where does Premiere fall short? I think on really big, complex projects, it can choke. Wait. Let me re-phrase that. I know on really big, complex projects, it can choke.

I think, too, that there’s simply the issue of standards. Final Cut is a language that every serious TV broadcast editor understands. (Avid is what most film makers edit on.) Therefore, knowing Final Cut helps, whether in an existing job or looking for one.

Final Cut has superior color grading, but I  use After Effects for finalizing videos if they do need it. (My videos are short enough to make this a viable option.) Final Cut is probably much better at dealing with some heavy lifting of big resolution files, especially if one uses Apple’s ProRes codec as a go-between.

What I do know is that directors such as Francis Ford Coppola have moved from the industry standard Avid systems to using Final Cut Pro in recent years. I don’t see them moving to Premiere. I’ve just got to assume there’s a reason. But I also think Sony Vegas sounds like a fantastic product. The only reason I’d never recommend it to someone is that no one uses Sony Vegas.

Most people online asking about Premiere vs. Final Cut raise the issue of PCs and Macs. Many of Premiere’s stability issues are actually Windows stability issues, as I rarely have issues with my Mac version of Premiere.

In summary, I’m not saying Premiere is better than Final Cut. Not at all. For many people, Final Cut’s going to be a better option. But for the videos I’m doing these days, I always open Premiere first. It’s stable, robust, plays well with the rest of the Adobe suite, and has some usability ease that’s superior to Final Cut.