why do you choose FCXP over Adobe Premier?

I'm not sure which program to edit in, everyone keeps telling me that FCPX is not a professional editing software, I beg to differ, but I'm not a pro, so I don't know. Why do you choose FCXP over Premier?

Back in 1985 I was in High School and I was blessed to have a very generous dad who bought me an original Macintosh. $2495. Close to $3,000 with an ImageWriter printer.

One of my buddies family had a IBM PC, running DOS. His Dad, who is a nuclear engineer, said to me when I brought my Mac over one day to do some homework, "I"m never going to use one of those toy computers from Apple. If you're going to do real work you can't use a mouse and click things on a screen."

Needless to say, things are a little different now, but Apple continues to innovate and will be mocked by many. Don't worry about what other folks are using. And if you get a glimpse of the future... go with that.

It's a learning curve if you already know how to use more traditional NLEs, but I think FCPX is worth it because:

1. I find that I can get organized more quickly and efficiently using FCPX.
2. The timeline is much more workable. in fact, the more complex your timeline needs to be, then the more of an advantage this becomes. (No patching or fumbling around with the tracks)
3. I can manipulate my edit much faster in X. It takes a fraction of the time to get my timeline to reflect what I want to happen in my story.
4. Multicam is the best in the business
5. I like the media management tools to keep my file system organized
6. Color Correction tools are outstanding- As an experienced colorist, I can grade my shows very quickly right inside the NLE
7. Compound clips are the most usefully implemented "Nesting" tool in any NLE
8. Audio starts synced, and stays synced- no matter what I do in my timeline and no matter how quickly I try to change things around.
9. The GUI is very clean and is less fatiguing to use over time. This sounds like it's not a big deal. However, I'm a pro that works in front of my rig 8-16 hours every day. The less eyeball strain I'm subjected to means more productive time in front of my screen.
10. I can get my jobs done way faster. (This pertains back to 9 because I'd much rather have an 8 hour or less long day than a 16 hour long day.)

Yes, there are plenty of things that are still not wonderful. I really hate the way the animation curves are manipulated - if you can even get to a curve. Overall, however, I think it's the best foundation to work from. For motion graphics and even some still photo pan and scan segments, I still go right for After Effects or Motion.

I think the keyword tagging makes it the smartest NLE for organizing sources.

I dislike "traditional" tracks. It's always made more sense to me to layer clips (connected clips and secondary story lines) to tell your story while something else (Roles) organizes the purpose of the files. Other NLE's tracks create conflicting use between compositing/layering and organizing. The result in those NLEs is a lot of wasted time organizing and a lot of wasted screen real estate in that process as well.

The magnetic timeline makes moving groups of related clips easy with less risk of sync issues and gaps. The "nip tuck" required in other NLEs wastes time.

The third party ecosystem of plugins and utilities is stronger for FCPX than other NLEs IMHO.

I've been working in post since about 1980 and this old dog loves the new tricks. I can focus on story telling rather than playing track Tetris.

According to both Evan Schechtman and Philip Hodgetts, Apple is consistently spending more on R&D for post-production tools than any other company.

I keep finding new reasons every day!

1. I am constantly speeding up my work time by being able to edit while importing and exporting.

2. For someone who builds graphical elements to a show, the link between the graphics person and the editor has never been more simple. The editor can easily find show elements like intro, overlays, lower 3rds, transitions all inside final cut....and the graphics person can update them extremely easy in Motion if needing too.

3. And, for having a website like FCP.co. There are so many devoted fans on FCP.co, that you feel you have a community you can ask anything and they will respond and try to help

It's more fun. It takes a bit of getting used to, yes, but it's fun to work with once you do. I'm still getting used to it. There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to see that's currently missing but I think much of that should be remedied when 10.1 comes out.

Scott Markowitz wrote: 8. Audio starts synced, and stays synced- no matter what I do in my timeline and no matter how quickly I try to change things around.

I don't know why people keep saying this. I'm able to get audio out of sync all the time and I don't even know how I do it. Clips become out of sync with the music or sound effects, etc (not with the audio that's embedded into the clip itself). I try to put a new clip someplace and FCPX spazzes out and my timeline suddenly looks like it got hit by a tornado. I just freeze for a sec and carefully hit COMMAND + Z and try again.

I have used both Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro for professional work, and I feel they are both very capable NLEs, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Both programs are equally capable of doing professional work, and I stay up to date with both of them simply because I don't want to put all of my eggs into one basket. Having said that, I haven't found myself wanting to cut in Premiere Pro for well over a year.

Adobe does a good job of consistently updating Premiere Pro, but for the most part we are simply seeing new features being added to an old paradigm. There is nothing inherently wrong with the old paradigm, but Apple has provided a fresh perspective, and given us a new approach to organizing and editing with Final Cut Pro X that is arguably much more efficient. Adobe, on the other hand, seems to be putting a lot of effort into making Premiere Pro more like Final Cut Pro used to be.

Here are the main reasons why I prefer to cut almost exclusively with Final Cut Pro X:

1 - Importing. While Premiere Pro has a regular import function you have to open up a separate Media Browser window to properly preview and import certain kinds of media. Final Cut Pro X has a unified import window.

2 - Organizing. Premiere Pro has traditional bins, or folders, as well as columns where you can enter metadata about your media. Final Cut Pro X allows you to put your media into Keyword Collections, and you can put any given clip, portion of a clip, or group of clips into any number of Keyword Collections without creating copies of the clip within the NLE. You also have Smart Collections that dynamically update based on user-selected criteria. You also have columns where you can enter metadata, an option to adjust content created date and time, and a batch renaming function within the program. Organizing and searching for media in Final Cut Pro X is faster, more fluid, and more efficient.

3 - Subclips. If you want to isolate and save a favorite portion of a clip in Premiere you have to make a sub clip; this creates a new clip, and this new clip does not give you access to any handles, or any media beyond the bounds of the sub clip. Final Cut Pro X does not have sub clips per se. Instead, you mark "Favorites", or ranges of clips. Making favorites does not create any new clips and it gives you full access to the entire clip. This is a much more flexible option that does not add unnecessary project clutter.

4 - Append Edit. Both NLEs allow for overwrite, insert, and replace edits. Final Cut Pro X also gives us the Append edit. It's a simple little thing: just press 'E' to add a clip to the very end of your timeline. It might not seem like a big deal, but it can be a huge time saver.

5 - Real-time effects previews. Just select a clip in the Timeline then hover your mouse cursor over any icon in the Effects Browser for a real-time preview of what that effect will look like without having to apply it first. Again, a huge time saver.

6 - Skimming. You can scrub through clips by clicking and dragging the playhead in both Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X. But Final Cut Pro X also gave us skimming, which allows you to preview any clip just by moving the mouse cursor across it --no clicking required. Premiere Pro later gave us Hover Scrub, but I've always found it to be poorly implemented.

7 - The Magnetic Timeline. Premiere Pro has a traditional track-based timeline. Final Cut Pro X got rid of the notion of tracks altogether, and replaced it with the concept of Storylines. There are a great many differences between the two types of timelines, more than I feel is necessary to explain here. Which one is better? I think this is purely a matter of personal preference. I find the Magnetic Timeline allows for a much more fluid and freeing editing experience. It certainly makes editing more fun for me.

8 - Scopes. I always use scopes while color-correcting. To put it bluntly, I find that Premiere Pro's scopes are horribly ugly green blobs that do not update until you've stopped playback. I think Final Cut Pro X has gorgeous, colorful scopes that update dynamically during playback.

9 - The Color Board. While Premiere Pro uses the traditional color wheel, Final Cut Pro X has a Color Board. They both perform the exact same function. I just find that dragging up and down to add or subtract a color is more precise and intuitive than dragging around in all directions. Most people would disagree with me. I will not lose any sleep over this.

10 - Publishing and rigging titles, transitions, and effects with Motion 5. You can use Motion to create (the above mentioned) elements and then choose which parameters to publish to Final Cut Pro X so that you can later manipulate the effect without having to leave Final Cut Pro X. This is huge. And Premiere Pro has nothing like this.

11 - The Range Tool. Audio clip fade handles. Sub-frame audio editing. Logic audio effects. A great keyer. Background rendering. A $300 price tag. The list goes on.

Premiere Pro definitely has its strengths. At the moment, audio mixing is one of them. And the integration with other Adobe applications, such as Photoshop, Audition, and After Effects is generally very good. But for me, none of this outweighs the strengths of Final Cut Pro X, which is designed to let me work extremely quickly and efficiently so that I have more time to be creative and build my story.

Premiere is a terrific product and I've little doubt that I could prepare my projects with it. However, I don't see myself moving away from FCPX in the near future:

• I like the FCPX magnetic storyline approach.
• Sub-frame audio editing and 'good enough' colour treatment tools built right in: while there are a couple of things I'd dearly love to see in FCPX, for the most part I can dub and colour correct my work right on the timeline. This isn't just a time-saver: I can show my clients coloured and dubbed rough-cuts without having to throw away that work once we've got picture lock.
• I've never understood what you're supposed to use as a mastering codec with Premiere. With FCPX, ProRes is always there, and ProRes is solid. This is less of an issue now Adobe Media Encoder is worth using, but it still bothers me.
• While I'd like some sort of round-trip workflow with Motion, I'm not a big user of graphics in my films. Premiere's integration with After Effects would be a huge advantage for some people, but not for me at present.
• Multi-camera.
• I've found FCPX's handling of H.264 and AVCHD/AVCCAM footage absolutely rock solid. When I last evaluated Premiere Pro it struggled with the same material on my systems.
• Depending on your needs, FCPX can be considerably cheaper to own.

My overall impression is that Premiere Pro is a thoroughly competent NLE in the style of Avid and (old) Final Cut Pro. Had Apple rebuilt FCP7 on a more modern media framework, I think they'd have had something very similar indeed to Premiere Pro. It's wholly reasonable for people to want a more modern, improved version of an approach they already know and like.

FCPX, meanwhile, is a demonstration that sometimes, even things that aren't broken are still worth fixing. I find FCPX fast, fluid, and most importantly fun. I feel like I'm editing my film rather than operating a piece of software, and that difference in perspective is priceless. Personal, to be sure, but it works for me.

jjsanderson wrote: Depending on your needs, FCPX can be considerably cheaper to own.

I don't think you can own Premiere any more. You can only rent it. If you use it every month that can get pretty expensive.

To me, editing in FCPX is like playing improvised jazz. It's so fluid and exploratory. No other NLE in the history of computers has made is so easy to organically tell a story. I find it's a tool that really gets out of the way (*disclaimer: once you throw out everything you knew about prior NLE - my wife who has never touched one before in her life picked it up in far less time than I did!)

Adobe has some really capable tools. But they are techie tools and they require a fair amount of technical finesse. I don't want to spend time mastering a tool, I want to master the story. For me, FCPX allows me to do that... and in far less time. Some people I know just don't get it, and that's ok. We are all hard wired differently. Some are more technical than others. But some people I feel get so lost in the technical details, they forget what really makes filmmaking (of all kinds) work: story.

I could not agree more with you “fcpguru.”

I am more geek like than most but the story is so important. The best advice I ever got from an editor was that you have to be able to explain why any one edit in a story is the way it is. NO exceptions allowed. It is a question of interdependence and the total being greater than the sum of the parts. All the tech stuff just gets in the way. FCP X helps me get closer to the story than any other edit system. Like editing itself, the edit program should be as invisible as possible. Apple excel in knowing what to leave out:

1) Do not want to have to spend years of my remaining life as an editor transcoding stuff on ingest!
Editing not yet ingested material is cool. I like being ahead of the curve.

2) Do not want to be confined to putting stuff either in this bin or that bin.
If you can get your head around it, Boolean Logic is actually sexy!!!

3) Do not want to be restricted to looking for some clips on a hard drive with some comments attached to them!
FCP X is a database with a Facebook like search box. The possibilities are limited only by your ability to keyword stuff creatively!

4) Do not want to have to be patching my tracks, ad infinitum…
It is not rocket science, label all Voice over once and for all in an event and let FCP X take care of the rest!

5) Do not want to be constantly tearing my timeline apart and sticking it together again every time I want to juggle a bunch of clips
FCP X just allows me to move stuff around and it takers care of the editors worst enemy black frames! What is wrong with that?

6) Do not feel the need to build elaborate track centric timelines that resemble "Candy Bombers.”
As things get more and more complex… Boxes, inside boxes, inside boxes work just fine for me.

7) Do not want to have to apply a filter to find out how it looks!
A quick preview, on the fly is all very fine, thank you very much.

Do not want to have to set and adjust pesky little keyframes with my mouse!
The range tool is my friend.

9) Do not want to make titles with a title tool that feels like it is from another century
Motion which is like Live Type on steroids with some dust and sparkles thrown in for good measure will do just fine

10) Do not want to have to wait for my project to export before moving on to the next edit.
There used to be some little script/program or what ever it was that allowed you to have two copies of Legacy FCP open at the same time, so that you could for example do editing and exporting at the same time. It was a nice work around but lets face it, when push comes to shove it was silly!

As for Premiere, it might sound arrogant but I do not see the point. Having used a mobile phone for more years than I care to remember I do not want to have to go back to a landline being my primary phone number. Going from FCP X to Premiere would fry my brain and be a step backwards for me.

This is my truth and I am not trying to suggest that it is the only truth: Storytelling is dead, long live Storytelling!