Youtube – common mistakes!
Well, we made the switch to Adobe (sorry, Apple). And we bought two new hi-spec PCs to run our new software.
Having read all about other peoples’ (mostly positive) experiences of this switch on the web, I had high hopes for the new hardware and workflow. And I haven’t been disappointed.
There has been much said about getting to grips with Premiere when you’ve been so used to Final Cut Pro for ten years. There are a few little gripes – things which you’re used to that you have to do without. But then, there are other, better features which definitely make up for this – making life much easier.
One negative has been colour correction. Adobe admit that the User Interface for Premiere’s colour correction is poor, and it’s the big thing they’re working on for the next version. But I do miss FCP’s 3-Way colour corrector, and Apple Color too. Still, After Effects comes with the free Colorista plugin, so it’s not the end of the world. Plus, the fact that Adobe seem to have better customer interaction than Apple means that the updates they make to the software reflect the needs of their client base, which is refreshing.
Another negative is Encore (the software for creating DVDs). On the surface, it’s a more intuitive, user-friendly program that DVD Studio Pro. However, underneath it’s missing a number of features. Primarily, the lack of any scripting languages means that there are things that are simply impossible to do in Encore that were a breeze in DVD Studio Pro.
But there’s one big positive that outweighs all of this: the workflow between the different products. You see, we’ve always used Adobe products such as After Effects, Audition, Photoshop and Illustrator to do our graphics, animation and sound. Switching resources between Apple’s Final Cut Pro and all these other Adobe packages was always laborious. Files had to be correctly prepared, exported, worked on, then re-exported and integrated back into a project.
Now, that’s a thing of the past. Because we’re working solely with Adobe products now, switching media between programs is pure joy. We can create After Effects compositions, import them into Premiere, and any changes we make to the After Effects file automatically update in Premiere. It’s the same with Audition – a couple of clicks, and the audio is ready for mastering. There are things we can do now which we wouldn’t have done before. Not because we couldn’t, but because the time involved would mean that it wouldn’t have been worth it.
And the fact that our new PCs are twice as powerful as our old macs mean that everything is so quick. We spend a lot of time watching progress bars – so any reduction in that is definitely worthwhile!
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