My First Adobe Premiere CS5.5 Experience – From a Final Cut Pro Refugee

It’s been several weeks now since Apple released their new version of Final Cut for the masses. Having seen a demonstration of Premiere Pro CS5.5 in use at a recent video production conference, I was fairly impressed at what I saw. But as we know from even Apple’s NAB demo of Final Cut Pro X, demonstrations are not the real thing.  However, seeing Apple’s demo of FCPX made me realize I didn’t want to go down the path of the iMovie-style interface, so even before Apple’s release of FCPX I was keeping a close eye on both the Premiere and Avid platforms.  Why I am not a fan of Apple’s new interface design is personal preference more than anything else, but I have used iMovie enough to know that it’s not very appealing to me personally.  Having it expanded upon in FCPX is not much of a consolation.

In the end I chose to go with Premiere over Avid for various reasons I won’t fully get into here – but suffice it to say that I really loved the integration features of Premiere with Adobe’s other products, already “professional standard” apps such as Photoshop and After Effects. I know that Avid is widely considered the only other “pro-level” video editing application for big film and video houses or studios besides Final Cut Pro 7 – but my gut was telling me that Premiere was/is poised to step up to the plate now that Apple has… ahem… “Chosen another market segment to focus on”, shall we say.  Photoshop and After Effects have long been given pro-level status as great tools. Adobe Premiere’s team is listening to their customers and has made great leaps in giving professionals what they want in an edit system.  I have seen many improvements since the late Nineties, when I last used Adobe Premiere on a PC before “going Mac”.  I think Adobe is building a professional base that will grow significantly – especially with so many editors now looking for a new professional workflow.

So, I’ve hopefully expounded enough on why I chose Premiere for my needs. Now for the real question – how was it in a real world first project? Well, first of all, I realized very, very quickly that to run Premiere on a Mac takes a lot of horsepower. Right out of the box it’s a 64-bit application suite.  So, it was off to the memory store to get beefed up. I originally had 14 GB of RAM, which was more than enough for Final Cut 7 – but Premiere seemed sluggish and not really happy with that. So, I added another 8 GB of RAM, which brought me up to a total of 20GB after losing a couple of Gig to memory card slot configuration.  The increased memory did help some. However, throughout my project I found myself still having to stay in ¼ or ½ playback resolution, which is acceptable for general editing chores, but I found myself wanting full resolution at certain times and feeling frustrated I couldn’t get smooth playback without rendering even minor color correction tweaks.

This led me to searching for a graphics card that would boost my system even further. In retrospect one thing I neglected due diligence on was how much I’d need to beef up my system to run Premiere efficiently. There are only three cards that are currently certified/tested with the Mac Pro for Premiere currently – and none of them are inexpensive (at least for me).  They are all capable of using the Premiere CUDA Mercury playback implementation, and they all boost Premiere’s real-time performance.  While I may end up investing in one of these cards sometime in the future, for now I do wish that it isn’t something that I feel is needed for normal editing – but I feel the system is sluggish without rendered timelines.  I love the concept of editing native with no rendering needed, but at least on the Mac side of things, that takes raw horsepower that even my 2.26Ghz Xeon 8-core can’t deliver.  It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s certainly not perfect – editing H264 native files and having them play back in full resolution, smooth as silk doesn’t really happen.  If a client were sitting behind me I’d feel nervous about claiming great real time performance with no rendering (without an accelerator/graphics card installed).

One other thing I did to improve playback is added a RAID-0 drive array to my system for editing purposes. Previously I had a RAID-5 array that I used for editing, but also as my preferred safe-haven for data.  I noticed a marked improvement in playback – not perfect, but better.  I want to say now that Final Cut 7 had it’s own issues on my system as well – not everything played back perfectly on FCP either. However, I do notice more overall sluggishness with Premiere over FCP on my Mac – your results may vary.

Multicam editing on Premiere was the same in many respects as FCP, but different in some ways as well. One small thing that I was used to doing in FCP that I could not do in Premiere was do searches in the timeline itself for clips with a particular title – for example if I wanted to find all of the clips from one camera in a timeline and highlight them for adding an effect, I could do it easily in FCP with the Find command. Premiere does not let you do this yet (I submitted a feature request for this – we’ll see if it happens!) Several people pointed out that if I wanted to add an effect to multiple clips from the same original source in a multicam sequence, I could just go back to the original camera’s individual stream and adjust it there – but that is not always a convenient way to add effects to specific groups of clips, especially when you want to add different effects over different sections of the multicam timeline.  Sometimes you don’t want a blanket approach to adding the effects, you want to be able to pick and choose – and it’s easier to do this with the Find command in FCP. Nuff said.

When it came to syncing the sound using PluralEyes, all I can say is that I wish PluralEyes were better integrated into Premiere as an application rather than manual export/import of XML files.  It worked okay, but I did have a couple of lockups when trying to import the XML created by PluralEyes.  It’s possible that I wasn’t doing something right, but sometimes it would work fine – so I’m guessing Premiere is just ultra-picky about their XML import – and sensitive.

The big time saver – being able to edit natively – had a big extra benefit in the end. My total project size was about half what it usually is in Final Cut, since I am not converting all of my raw footage to ProRes first. Even with ProRes final masters exported from Premiere, my total project size was at least 50% smaller.

Final export to DVDs was interesting.  Because I am a newbie to Adobe Encore I’m still reserving judgment on it, but so far it seems like a very powerful (but sometimes testy) application.  Because it has so many features and configurable options it is easy to get lost in all of the options available. The provided menus and templates are helpful, and got me started quickly. However, sometimes I found myself researching the manual or online forums for answers to questions about animated thumbnails, among other things. Animating the DVD menus in general is not something that Adobe has necessarily made it super easy to do, but it can be done.

As it turned out I did end up with a problem in one of my DVD menus that ended up on the discs I delivered to my client. It was a problem that I thought had been corrected prior to delivery, and one that is particularly hard to diagnose and fix at times. It involved behavior that was related to conflicting end-action commands within the disc.  Long story short, it was sometimes confusing and obviously left me vulnerable to missing a potential problem with the disc.  When I went back to fix the problem the final time, I ended up trashing and recreating the menu/problem in question – and that took care of the problem.

Overall, I’d say my first experience with Premiere since the late 90’s was pretty good, with some caveats.  Just as FCP is native to the Mac, I really believe Premiere has been really tweaked and primed for the PC.  It does run on a Mac, but not as smoothly as FCP for roughly the same amount of hardware investment.  I don’t have the CUDA graphics card (one of only three that are actually approved for Mac use) that would give me the extra graphics acceleration, and I think without that it’s always going to be a bit on the rough side regarding playback, especially if effects are involved.  It’s telling that Adobe has approved a whole list of CUDA-capable cards that are PC-approved, but only three for the Mac (one of which is not being produced anymore).

I will be working more with Premiere, although I will probably be doing hybrid projects for a while as well – using the strengths of both FCP7 and Premiere to my advantage.  Ironically, after boosting my memory and drive configurations, FCP7 is running incredibly well.  Luckily, Premiere doesn’t get a complex, and Final Cut Pro isn’t jealous.  Eventually I may be forced to make a choice to give up FCP7 completely, but until then I can enjoy the best of both worlds – and when I am forced to give up FCP7, I’ll consider making that final $800+ CUDA card investment that promises smoother playback and performance.

So there it is – my first impressions on my first Premiere project from start to finish on a Mac.  I’m sure that there will be some opinions and experiences that differ from mine, but regardless I hope this article has at least given some insights into what to expect if you are a Final Cut Pro refugee.

About Bill:

Bill has been a media junkie since he first started obsessing over Alvin & the Chipmunks at the age of three. Since then he has worked in many different roles doing professional media including audio-for-video engineer, sound designer, corporate multimedia specialist, mobile media producer, and currently a freelance producer for corporate and event video.  He hates writing about himself in the third person, and also hates Wendy’s new fries. You can see his work @ www.billvincentmedia.com and www.firstdancepictures.com.

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