Be afraid. At this very moment, someone is cutting their video with Adobe Premiere. It’s not the world’s worst program. But it’s not the new kid on the block like Final Cut Pro or the old reliable standard like Avid. It just seems so… unneccesary. And grounding. And outdated.
Adobe Premiere used to have horses on the box. Perhaps they were put out to pasture. The same for the program, says this editor, and here’s why.
(1) Reliability.
Let’s just say you won’t be the first person to complain that Premiere’s crashed on them.
(2) Price.
Adobe Premiere starts at $849. Or you could spend less than eight hundred for the academic edition of Final Cut Pro Studio, which comes with add-ons like DVD Studio Pro, LiveType, Motion and self-respect.
(3) High speed in, low speed out.
Premiere requires more of an investment in fast processors and heavy RAM and yet still moves slower. In this fast-paced age, can you really wait for Premiere to render everything?
(4) Media management.
Improvements have been made, but Adobe has always come under criticism for poor media management in Premiere. God help you if there’s a mess and your project can’t find its files, because reconnecting and lining everything up is not a picnic. Compare with Final Cut Pro, which helpfully supplies metadata on all its clips, or Avid, which shepherds studio feature films with their mountains of media with no trouble.
(5) Don’t buy into the audio hype.
In some opinions, Premiere has superior audio editing tools to its competitors. Let’s assume so. But why would you use your editing software for your final sound mix anyway? Even Adobe is willing to sell you something else for that. Using video editing software on sound is like beating a burglar off with a broomstick; it’s not impossible, but there’s better weapons in the house.
It stands to reason that Adobe After Effects will work well with Adobe Premiere. But how much of your editing involves effects? More pertinently, examine your workflow. What would actually be impeded by using After Effects with another program? Seamless integration on this front is nice, but is it worth giving up something else for?
(7) Look to the future.
Track Premiere’s development over the years, then compare it to its competitors. It may not be important for your situation if Premiere has been slow to accept, say, P2 cards or MPEG-IMX. But wouldn’t it be nice to get software that thinks about the future for you, so you don’t have to? Innovation is key because this is an art of being on the cutting edge. Adobe Premiere does not always keep up with the horse race.
(8) It’s important to have standards.
Avid is the standard in the film and video post-production industry. Final Cut Pro will get you there too, with kvetching along the way from die-hard traditionalists. But Premiere? Not a contender. If you’re by yourself, fine, but if you need to work and interact with other editors, you need something everyone can work with!
Chances are if you cut on Premiere you’re stuck in a Microsoft Windows PC environment. Now why would you do a thing like that? Macintosh is the way to go in the creative content environment, and it’s only going to get more and more accepted.
Non-linear digital video editing is a fast-moving field, and Adobe Premiere is getting left behind. Don’t let your projects get left behind with it.
Whatever happened to the horses on that box, anyway? Were they made into glue? Premiere may as well boil these days; there is no reason to turn to Adobe on this. Photoshop and Illustrator are excellent, superb programs and worthy of your purchase; After Effects, likewise, should be in every film and video professional’s library. But let Adobe stick to what it’s good at, and leave Premiere in the dust.
