Re: Premiere as NLE of choice, catching flak from peers?

Hi...

I've talked about this before.

I recently re-joined the creative community after several years of working in a sales, training, and product demonstration capacity, so I've worked on every major editing platform.

Yes, Premiere does get it's share of knocks from industry peers. I'm was guilty of it myself. Adobe has themselves to blame for some of this. Premiere wasn't good for a long time. Endlessly crashy with an unconventional editing metaphor and early A/V sync (pre DV era) issues. Combine this with Adobe's propencity to bundle Premiere for free with every capture device didn't do them any favors in terms of building cache with the product.

That changed with the introduction of Premiere Pro. New guts, a more conventional editing approach, and some good press combined with better marketing really helped Adobe a lot. But it takes time for the word of the improvement to ripple thru the industry. So a lot of people hang on to the old notions of what Premiere was.

I was required to learn Premiere Pro with Matrox Axio for my last job. At first I was a bit snobby about it, but my attitude changed quickly.

The company I am with now is an entirely Adobe facility with multiple systems running on a SAN. I edit happily away on Premiere (and Matrox) every day, and it works really well.

Now looked at from a marketshare point of view....In some cases, Apple may be a better choice. Apple does have a hot hand right now in terms of industry attention. If the work you do is work you finish...Adobe is great. If clients expect to walk away with anything other than a finished master project or file, meaning they want Project assets to take to other facilities....well then Apple may be more appealing, simply because more facilities have it, people can take their assets more places. There is one exception to this this beyond Premiere. More Pros may be editing with FCP, but Adobe does own the rest of the pipeline. After Effects, and Photoshop are the norm in most facilities and Apple's Motion (and other bundled products) have not displaced them.

As I have used both FCP and Premiere Pro, there are any number of things I can say I like better about Premiere Pro, but I have also sent many feature requests to Adobe regarding things I've seen in FCP that could be implemented in PPro to make it even better.

So Adobe is plenty capable. Don't let that dissuade you. Take a look at the kind of work you want to do (self contained or shared) and let that guide you.

Good luck!

Alex