As far as I am concerned I have four choices when it comes to editing for the rest of 2012

HD Warrior

PART ONE…Which way to go ?

As far as I am concerned I have four choices when it comes to editing for the rest of 2012…

1. Stay with FCP-7
2. Move over to FCP-10
3. Re learn Premiere Pro CS5.5
4. Start afresh with Premiere Pro CS6

Lets start with FCP-7, a program that I have been editing with for the best part of 5 years and am very comfortable with but as a serious editing program has now been left behind with rendering and frame rate problems with no possibility of any further updates from Apple.

Final Cut Pro 10 has very good points not to mention the vast amount of plug-ins being produced almost weekly for FCP-10, Apple are supporting it and updating it with new features like Canon MXF and 1080 50p support… but it does not act the way you think it should act and thats a serious stumbling block and a lot of the FCP-7 style of editing is hidden. I have lost material using FCP-10 even lost edited projects and that disturbs me.

Premiere Pro 5.5 is a bit quirky and does not behave as you expect coming from Final Cut but it will allow you to use the same Matrox MX02 MAX box and drivers as Final Cut Pro 7 giving you a safety margin if all else fails.

Premiere Pro CS6 is very responsive using the Mercury engine via the Nvidia FX4800 graphics card for mac. It has a “Final Cut look” about it which is very satisfying and you can now choose between one clip or the other the same as FCP-7 which means Adobe have been listening to Final Cut end users. Adobe major on Premiere Pro as a company, the same cannot be said about Apple so Premiere in my opinion has a future. The downside is the Matrox MX02 box which needs “flashed” with drivers 3.1.0.0086 installs the Matrox MXO2 MAX v3.1 (build 86) software for Mac OS X Lion only (10.7.4). This software supports Adobe CS6 only (with Premiere Pro 6.0.1 and Media Encoder 6.0.1). read more...