[thePurpleGiant]

Hello Multimedia forum crowd..I don't post in here often, but I have a question.

Has anyone here gone from video editing only in Premier, to using Final Cut Pro? Was the transition hard? Were there any major benefits? (mainly concerned with video editing, outputting to iDVD...and later DVD Studio Pro when there's more money available)

I am very familier with Premier, but I am about to start with a whole new video editing setup and basically I just want to know if it's worth buying FCP over Premier.

Thanks for any advice

Jeremy

[Demonhood]

i went from Premiere to FCP, but probably for different reasons than other people. sure, FCP is more powerful, sure, FCP is updated more often, sure, once you get it down, it can do just about everything you want. but my reason for switching was that Premiere didn't handle my digital video feed well. it wasn't sure what to do with it. it didn't like my firewire ports. i think it missed its analog days and was trying to hold me back.

FCP had no such problems.
the learning curve was a couple months (i didn't use it all that often right off the bat), and a book would probably help you along (altho the new versions come with a super fat manual).

so i have no regrets having switched. it should be noted that i didn't pay for premiere (used thru my old work), and that i get FCP with an educational discount.

[subego]

I would rate FCP better than Premiere in almost every respect, and (at least for me) it had a very short learning curve (NLE is NLE, regardless of who makes it). There was, however, one snag... Dissolves.

Dissolves are fairly intuitive in Premiere, but in FCP they STILL, after several months, make absolutely no sense to me. Every time I have to do a dissolve, it involves seemingly irreproducible voodoo to kludge it into place.

So expect it to be maybe a little sticky with regards to that, but you should otherwise experience smooth sailing. I personally would never go back to Premiere unless I was forced to.

P.S. The manual IS super fat, and informative. The online help ain't too shabby either.