Happy New NLE… (Apple vs Adobe, 9 months on…)

mi:nd:wa:rp by James Meurer

I kept meaning to update this blog – and then something would change that was worth putting in.. So I delayed – again and again. Finally things seem to have settled down. Apologies to those who tried to comment on the preceding blog – between trolls, spam and me not having time to moderate properly, I had to turn comments off. It should all be up and running now… Back to the topic!

So in brief this is what happened in the last 9 months:

I worked a little with CS 5.5 – both Premiere Pro and After Effects, and then CS 6 came out – and Adobe gave me an extended trial of Production Premium to give me a proper chance to get my head around moving from FCP 7 to Premiere Pro (and Motion to After Effects – Compressor to Media Encoder etc).

I’ve now run 4 full real-world projects through CS 6 and a number of smaller personal things. I also went back and ran a couple of projects through FCP 7 – to make sure I’d remembered everything correctly – and that I was measuring current performance rather than that when my hardware was newer etc.

Please bear in mind that for all of this I was using a mid-2010 Mac Book Pro – with 8gb of RAM. The graphics card is not Mercury Playback Engine compatible – (The Mercury Playback Engine is Adobe’s name for their system that combines available RAM, the CPU and GPU to maximize performance – you can read about it here: so I’m yet to experience the delights of a zero-render edit. read more...