It's got better integration with the Adobe suit of programs (Photoshop, After Effects, etc) and the fact it has BluRay support NOW is a big plus. I still don't think I could bring myself to install Premiere on a Mac. Despite the fact Premiere will have better Adobe suite integration- FCP has better "MAC" integration.

Anyone else jump from FCP to Premeire for mac? I just bought the Mac version of Premeire and am testing it out. Not sure if it is going to be as good as fcp or not, but at least I have Bluray settings. Just wondering if anyone else has thought about this move?

Bruce

I just made the "jump " - not completely, but I won a copy of Premier in a drawing so I've been trying it out. It is not very stable on my iMac, it drives me a bit crazy. I use FCP on 2 Mac G5's and FC Express on my MacBook Pro. Also use Premier on a Sony Vaio laptop for Blu-Ray authoring. All my Mac's are still Tiger except the iMac is new and has Leopard.

Things I like better about FCP -
Keyframing - it is very easy in FCP to keyframe opacity and volume in the timeline with the "Pen" tool; damn if I can figure out how to do it that way in Premier.
if the "fliters" tab is open, and I open a different clip, it stays on the filters tab - in Premier it goes back to the video tab every honkin' time, drives me nuts.
Interface still feels a bit awkward to me after 4 years of FC.

Things I like better in Premier -
There is a "rate change" tool (may not be exact name) that allows you to change the speed % on a clip by just shortening/lengthening the clip - I would REALLY like to have that in FCP
There is a "flash through whilte" and "flash through black" transition that makes it easy to do that without generating a solid, keyframing opaicity, etc. Can't find a similar in FCP.
"History" tab - like the one in Photoshop - if you need to "undo" you can see the list of what you did, and select how far back to "undo" - sometimes in FCP you "think" you did something, or
maybe did something to the wrong clip, but here you can concretely see that you did "X then Y then Z" and decide what to undo.

If it didn't crash on me 16 times a day I would probably be pretty happy with Premier for editing. To be honest, I think I may have a project that is corrupt on my iMac, as it crashed over and over and over while I edited this project, but only occasionally with other projects (maybe 1 or 2 times a day). So I'm not sure I can blame the computer or the software.

One neat thing I noticed - if you go into the area to customize your keyboard shortcuts, there are a few different sets to choose from - and one of them is Final Cut - so if you're used to certain keyboard shortcuts you could switch to that set, and / or manually customize the keyboard shortcuts yourself. I find it speeds me up if I don't have to remember which shortcut, or hit the wrong one and have to do "undo".

In Reply To

I am really loving the integration between Encore and Photoshop, as I do quite a bit of my work in Photoshop. Seems like I can do quite a bit more in Encore than Studio DVD, which has become dated in my opinion. Bruce

In Reply To

It's too bad you can't just purchase Encore for the Mac. I'm still using Encore CS2 on my PC to author my DVD's after I edit them on my Mac, mainly because I haven't had the chance yet to learn how to use Studio DVD. I'm sure I'll miss some things in Studio DVD that I've come accustom to in Encore. But I refuse to purchase the whole Adobe editing suite for the Mac, because I'm defiantly not going back to Premiere Pro.

So are you using an external BR burner?

I'm using an internal burner in an external enclosure. I bought a Sony BWU-200S and put it in a Vantec 530S2 5.25" (SATA to USB 2.0) enclosure. When I turned it on and connected the USB cable both the Mac Pro and Encore found it with no difficulty. I was able to burn a disc immediately.

I believe OWC and Fastmac are now selling an external Blu-ray burner. I bought the Sony because it was less expensive and is a 4x burner. The only thing I can't do with it is play back Blu-ray discs. There is no support for commercial BD playback on the Mac and I believe Toast would be necessary to watch burned discs. In my case, I burned to Blu-ray RW and tested playback on a Playstation 3.

The Lite-On drive for $349 looks interesting. Also 4x. No doubt prices will continue to fall.

I am just soooo sick of shelling out $500 every 6 months for new versions of fcp

In Reply To

A) No one is forcing you to upgrade.
B) Adobe does the same thing.

Now, I am not aware of 2 $500 upgrades in the last year for FCS. THey offered the very generous cross-grade last year for $300 and then FCS2 came out for the $500 upgrade. I am not aware of anything since then.

-gl