[Trister1]

I am presently using iMovie2 for video editing, but it is limited, so I am looking to upgrade. Any suggestions? Thoughts on Adobe Premiere, or comparable editing software?
Thanks

[slimshady023]

I'm not sure about other users, but Adobe Premiere (version 5.1c) was an absolute nightmare for me. I used the application primarily for frame-by-frame animation sequencing, where the results would be recorded to tv through an ATI 128 VR video card. Premiere crashed so often, and in such simple situations such as saving, that I completely dedicated my single-processor (AGP) G4 to this and the ATI video extensions. Still it crashed.

I even formatted my hard drive into partitions, using a different OS to boot from on each partition (8.6, 9.0, and 9.0.4), to fix whatever incompatibilites there might have been for a specific Mac OS. Still, it refused to work right. It was like a barn built on a shaky foundation, if you know what I mean.

Adobe recently released version six of Premiere, which hopefully has repaired some of these instabilities. Seriously, the other Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator are among the most stable I've used. Look for Macworld or MacAddict reviews before spending any money on this product.

-slimshady023

[dannyn]

Adobe Premiere 6, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Digital Origin EditDV would be great choices for video editing programs. It really boils down to what hardware you have, what type of material you're working with, and how much money you can spend.

EditDV is nice in that is has several different levels you can purchase. There's a free/shareware version that is great for quick edits, some filters, and output. However, it isn't much beyond what iMovie alread offers. You can move up from there to more advanced features in the higher end versions of the program

Premiere 6 is my personal favorite at the moment. I've been using Premiere for 7+ years now, and it hasn't failed me yet. Version 6 is a very impressive upgrade to 5.1c. It has nice integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects, and the interface is very streamlined. As Slimshady has pointed out, Premiere 5.1c was not a very good program. Although I didn't have as many problems with it, it was still a buggy program. Version 6, however, is rock solid. I've been using it since the beta (I was a beta tester), and in the course of 4 months, I only crashed it twice. I haven't crashed the release version yet (knock on wood...).

Final Cut Pro is the highest end and most expensive of these programs. It offers you everything from advanced multi-track video editing to basic compositing. I like it a lot. For a dedicated video editing suite, FCP absolutely rocks. The only reason I don't use it for my work is because I need to use Premiere and After Effects together a lot and After Effects' compositing and effects features blow FCP out of the water.

I hope this helps.

Danny

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[Trister1]

Thanks A LOT for the detailed info.