[warnergt]

I'm looking to pursue digital movie making a little more aggressively. I have an older version of Adobe Premier which I like a lot but I'm wondering how it stacks up against Final Cut Pro.

I'm guessing Premier should have an OS X version in the not-too-distant future. I'd like to get working on this soon but I would hate to dish out $999 for Final Cut Pro and discover later that I could have waited a little bit and got an equally capable Premier for a much smaller upgrade price.

What do you think? What does/will Final Cut Pro have that Premier doesn't? ..and what does/will Premier have that Final Cut Pro doesn't. When will there be an OS X release of Premier?

[hmurchison2001]

Premiere will not catch up to FCP anytime soon.

FCP offers

Colorsync Color Correct
Realtime transitions
Offline RTA(work in low resolution finish your work and then fly in high quality clips)
SPEED
Compositing(like having After Effect Lite inlcuded)
Better Audio
Multiprocessor Aware.

Try to get FCP at all costs...you won't regret it.

[Theodour]

Premier 6 is a great program. Premier 5 was too (bad DV support, though). If you are going to stay in OS 9, then that is just fine -- pick up a used Aurora Fuse, and you can even get around some of the DV codec's limitations.
If you've got the money, though, FCP is just way to hard to let slip by. It is MADE exclusively for the mac, where Premier develops for Windows too (and I think does a better job on their windows version) and it just such a luxury suite. FCP totally behemoths Premier, no contest.
Still, I like premier -- but I wouldn't spend money on it unless I knew it was coming to X without any doubts.

[Thippy]

I own FCP3 and love it. If you're a student you can get the Academic use version for $299 like I did. I got it through my fiance, who's a college student. Maybe buy it through a friend.

[Chuck_star]

I'd like to encourage moving to FCP. Being a Multimedia graduate, I've learned and used both extensivly. FCP is hands down my working environment of choice.

[Millennium]

FCP is great.

However, I would base your decision at least partially on how you plan to distribute your videos.

If you're planning on using mainly videotape, DVD, or anything else meant to be viewed on a television screen, then FCP is fine. However, I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be geared much for things that will be distributed digitally; you can't render sharp text (the stock generators all put it through some rather extreme antialiasing, meant to be used for a TV screen where it looks decent but not really suitable for digital distribution).

I find this very sad, and I think I must be doing something wrong, because this would mean that iMovie makes better text (assuming digital distribution, again) than FCP does. That doesn't make sense to me, but if it's not the case, then Apple did a really good job of making sharp text hard to use.