Re: CS6 is released - so what now?

[Oliver Peters] "Hmmm.... Not sure I agree. If you know FCP "legacy" or MC or PPro, it's pretty seamless (as a user) to go back-and-forth among them. Explain the "Adobe/FCP7 media paths" comment, though. I don't see that myself, so what do you mean? The FCP 7 scratch folder media structure is basically identical to how Premiere works."

I should have been more clear.

I meant media paths in how the media is imported, what happens when it's imported, what happens during editing , and finally what happens when you export.

With FCP, if you didn't have certain flavors of .mov, the media is either rewrapped to .mov or transcoded to mov. This can sometimes take time, and in many cases doubles up media (your original, and the working transcode copy).

Once in fcp7, your media usually matches (or closely matches) a timeline codec.

PPro does not have a timeline codec.

During editing in 7, your processed effects are rendered, usually throughout the editing process in pieces.

Premiere essentially encourages you to render only what you need to, and with a beefy CUDA system and depending on what types of footage you have, you really don't have to render at all.

When your project is complete and fully rendered in 7, 7 allows a very quick export (either by reference or self contained) to the timeline codec. With very sparse exceptions, this simply can't happen in Pr CS6, today. With Premiere, you have to transcode on export. There's a way to setup preview files and use those for faster access for premiere, and it's viable, but if you read the instructions, Adobe recommends NOT using preview files. It doesn't mean it can't be done. Those preview files are then reencoded.

So, 7 has transcode time up front, some render time in the middle and quick outputs.

Premiere has near zero import time, NOT a lot of rendering in the middle, and depending on your timeline, you can have significantly long outputs. The nice thing about Premiere is that the beefier machine you have, the faster all of it goes.

Here's some over generalizations, and a lot of this depends on your footage formats for both apps.

I will say, i-frame MXF editing in Premiere is wicked awesome. Anyway:

Visually, FCP's time looks like this for the most part: > from beginning to end. More time up front.

Visually, Pr's time looks like this for the most part: < from beginning to end. More time towards the end.

When you add dynamic link and other factors, Pr can get longer toward the end of the workflow. You can setup uncompressed Preview files (or ProRes if on a Mac, Cineform et al on all machines) and that will decrease export times, but using uncompressed will significantly hamper hard drive space and throughput.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, they are simply different and learning the Pr way to do things represents a difference in how FCP/Pr work, and they do represent differing philosophies.

Then there's media management. Reconnecting in Pr CAN be much harder depending on your footage, and you can mess it up pretty good if you're not careful. I realize our particular multi-user onsite/offsite workflow does not match others, so it is our particular problem and ymmv on that issue.

Again, I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they are different and should be recognized as such.

It's not hard or impossible, I just feel that Pr CS6 shouldn't be called "FCP8" as it takes away from the Pr philosophy of the media path.

QuickTime handles a lot of things that are open to the user on Premiere. There's pros and cons to both.

Jeremy