BCM to go with an Adobe / Avid combination for Post

Biscardi Creative Blog by Walter Biscardi

After months of testing, playing, discussing, testing, playing, and then discussing some more, we’ve decided that moving forward Biscardi Creative Media will support both Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer workflows moving forward.

What we found as we went through the testing is that there are positives and negatives to both systems so it’s really hard to just choose one. As my editors got to playing with both systems it became clear that for certain workflows, one tool works better than the other. So why limit ourselves to JUST one or the other. Put both tools in the toolbox and utilize the most efficient tool for the job at hand.

With Adobe, it still feels too much like it was “designed by an engineer” and not by editors. If you go with the Adobe keyboard presets, it’s not all that intuitive if you’re coming from FCP or Avid. Switching to the FCP presets makes things a bit better, but things like track assignments, stereo vs. mono tracks and other functions throughout the app that should be simple, sometimes are a bit convoluted. Such as not making it all that easy to adjust your audio before placing the material into the timeline, FCP was much easier with the multi-tabbed Source window layout. The more you play with Premiere Pro, the more you “forget FCP” and adapt your workflow to the new tool.

The biggest hit against Premiere Pro now out on the forums is the sometimes tremendous render times at the end of a project. This is mainly due to the fact that Premiere Pro can utilize just about ANY format natively, and in realtime during the edit. The price you pay is that at the very end of the project, you must render the entire timeline and depending on the raw formats, timeline settings and other variables, it can sometimes add up to a significant render time that far exceeds anything we saw in FCP. This can definitely be a scary prospect when you’ve got a tight deadline to get something out the door. read more...