Goodbye FCP

Like many video editors, I have been struggling with the dilemma of either completely re-inventing my edit workflow with FCP X, or adding Adobe Premiere Pro.

Yesterday, after working all week on testing various combinations of Toast/FCP 7/Compressor to get 1440x1080 and 1280x720 clips for VOD and DVD, I installed Premiere Pro.

20 minutes later I had my most recent shoot all laid out on the timeline, and ready for export. 90 minutes later, I had my 70-minute movie as the mpeg-2 for VOD. No Toast for AVCHD conversion, no Compressor. All-in-one Premiere.

From what I read on video forums, the version of Premiere that I downloaded yesterday was not the Premiere other editors struggled with for 2-3 years while I was producing dozens of SD DVD and VOD videos. Premiere has evolved a lot, especially in the past year that Apple has pissed off an entire industry with FCP X, and for 2 years that FCP 7 has gone not updated.

Adding FCP X might be an eventual possibility. The two things holding me back: FCP X shares some Library resources with FCP 7, making those resources no longer accessible to FCP 7, and Premiere accepts AVCHD files with the same ease that Premiere, and FCP 7, accepts DV video on its timeline(s). If I want to go back into an old project, would FCP 7 still be able to; and both of my cameras, video and still with movie, are AVCHD, and I don't have time nor money for all of the conversion steps with FCP 7, possibly FCP X.

Apple developed Final Cut in the early 2000s, bought out from Macromedia's fledgling video department being developed alongside Flash, in order to have synergy with its hardware lines: Final Cut was a reason to buy a Mac, and Macs were improved to handle the demands of the ever-upgraded Final Cut. That stopped in 2010 with the iPad.

With Apple moving to social media mobile video platforms, pro editors and production houses are left gasping for air.

Premiere looks and feels the same as FCP 7. Apple tries to make fun of the FCP 7/Premiere timeline that goes back to the 1990s, but there's no need to try to compete in that way. FCP X might be a good product, but Apple wasn't able to lead an industry of horses to their water, and they were't able to get them to drink...

Welcome to Premiere, Nick! I've been using it for years and always thought it was the best video editor available, other than maybe Avid. For editing HD video I think Premiere is the best, although I hear Sony Vegas is good too. I tried it and FCP and hated them both.

It has been a tough afternoon.

I am trying to build a movie menu montage... a stack of clips and text (video generators) to build a montage of 7 video clips (6 windows), background, 6 text boxes 1 under each video window, and 2 more text boxes.

How do you copy 20-seconds of a clip from the feature sequence, then paste it into the movie menu sequence?

How to you scale a video clip? Put the gold border around the clip?

This is what I'm trying to make: 6 video clips scaled from 100% down to about 15%, stacked on top of each other, but then positioned for the 2 rows of 3 across, 100% background, 5 text boxes as names of the clips, and "play" and title of the movie.

Attachment 3878

(sorry the video is "red", missing, in FCP, I've finished this one in FCP, wanting do recreate n PP).

Attachment 3877

This will go into Encore, to put buttons over each of the 6 video windows, plus "play". So far, that is not working either. In Encore the menus and buttons Library came empty. The 30-minute download "fix" was some stupid birthday and Halloween menus, and NO buttons.

I liked being able to drag the AVCHS clips at 1920x1080 and just start working, but making the menu has me at a loss.

And trying to get Encore to do anything like the tutorial videos on YouTube.

OK, it's called Picture In Picture. The rest is in the "Effects Controls".

Learning new ways to ask questions.

Although I think Premiere is currently the best video editor on the market, I cannot say the same for Encore as a DVD builder. I have yet to find an easy to use DVD builder, but fortunately I don't make a lot of DVDs. When I do I just use the simplest menu structure available.

The only suggestion I can offer is to sign up at the Adobe forums and post your question there (without any naked pics of course!). I have found their user forums to be a great resource.

I've made a few discs with GUI For DVDAuthor (Windows)

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/GUI-for-dvdauthor

I think the problem lies in my (official) copy of Encore fresh from Adobe 2 days ago, did not come with the template menus and buttons.

So I'm going to wait until Monday to call and point out to them that I am not the only one on Adobe forums to be slighted by this.

I think I'm going to stick with both FCP 7 and Premiere Pro for a while longer.

The killer is Encore. Just awful stubborn mule.

Probably will give FCP X a try, also. I get to use it for 30 days free.

I seem to recall that the downloadable versions of Premiere and Encore do not come with templates... you have to download these separately. The DVD versions come with them.

The thing I didn't mention in this thread last July, is/was that I am doing Premiere Pro (and all of the Adobe CSS Apps) IN THE CLOUD!! Using an Adobe CSS Cloud Subscription.

It works! For 7 months now! In multiple countries! It actually works!

Because I am a 1-man shop, and only actually used PhotoShop and InDesign and Acrobat up until July 2012, the old CSS Suite that I had from a trial box was sufficient. When Lion broke CSS, I went with Apple Pages instead of InDesign, and now almost 2 years later, I ONLY use Apple Pages for DVD box cover and DVD face label artwork. It is so much friendlier to use!

I made over 200 of my Books with InDesign, now I make them with a PHP script, that builds a multi-page PDF document from a directory of .jpgs. 48 .jpgs = 48-page PDF, complete with text added to the front cover and back cover.

When I got my brand new machine in February 2012, and sold the other two, I therefore sold the only machine I had with anything pre-Lion that my CSS Apps still worked on.

When PhotoShop broke, I used Apple Preview, to do almost everything I needed to do on the machine I had with Lion. But then faced with no working PS, I first did a Cloud subscription only for PS. Part of me thinks I wrote about that a year ago, when I did my first Cloud subscription.

Then in July 2012 when I had some coaching from one of my VOD partners, and figured out the skinny way to do 1920x1080p HD and 1280x720p HD video with Premiere Pro, I upgraded to the full CSS Cloud subscription. (I still author my DVDs with Apple DVD Studio Pro, and when FCPX proves to handle AVCHD, I will drop PP in a heartbeat. last I checked, the FCPX App was like $250 flat).

So far, the only negative about the Cloud Subscription is the way in which they process credit cards. The old fashioned way they use, gets an authorization day one, but they do not capture the funds, or close their batch, for 3-4 days, and in the interim, the amount is not calculated into the "available" balance. because my CSS was 3 years old, it didn't qualify for the $29/month, and instead I am fine paying the $49/month. But when $49 is not calculated in the available balance, it presents an open door for fraud to occur with fraudulent on-line charges, or buying something at a POS and getting an approval by thinking I have $50 more than I really do - especially when I am outside of the US, and there is NOT a branch of that Bank to go run to.

THat, too, was difficult to argue with "customer service" in India, because the India-an on the phone had no experience with, therefore no idea of how, the US banking system worked - of course!

But those faced with the option of laying out a ton of money to upgrade CSS vs. a $29 or $49 monthly CLOUD subscription - The Cloud subscription works! Sorry I didn't describe that part last July, for those of you who might have done the cash CSS upgrade. For me as a 1-man shop, the subscription works.

I switched to Premiere as well and am going with the cloud.

Lloyd

Very happy with Sony Vegas.

Did you know that you can download the CS2 version of Premiere from the Adobe website with a serial number for free?

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

The Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group, which I attended their monthly meetings 2004-2006, and learned a lot about the business, recently changed its name, dropping the exclusive Final Cut Pro reference. I still like to visit them on-line www.LAFCPUG.org .

They already had been doing side-by-side comparisons to Premiere and Sony Vegas. While PP is the big player, Sony Vegas always was well respected. I think I went home from one meeting in 2005 with a trial disc, but I don't remember if it was WIN or OSX. Back then, I did have a couple of Windows machines, now I just have Mac.

Isn't it possible to use Final Cut X with the old DVD Studio Pro? That's what the folks at the Apple Store told me.
Also, hasn't FCX added back a lot of what was removed like multiclip and DVD chapters?

Is there anyone using Final Cut X and happy with it?

yes, I do use the ages old DVD Studio Pro for authoring DVDs as I have since 2005.

I'm doing a project tonight that is audio intensive, so I converted the AVCHD camera files to .mov, and then spent a couple of hours editing (me as the director out of) the audio, adding a brand new music track, as well as sweetening the live sound of the shoot - all in FCP (3 years old) !

It was sooooo much fun to be using FCP (3 years old) again!

As soon as I know that FCP X can handle raw AVCHD files, I'll be on it. There's times I need Acrobat and DreamWeaver from the Adobe Cloud subscription as well, but not life or death now that I create my PDFs by PHP script.

I guess could do all of my projects, again, by first converting AVCHD to MOV and then using FCP or FCP X, I just thought I should give Premiere Pro a try, and save the conversion step - but PP is so much harder than FCP.

And when the software is hard, the creativity is stifled, when my brain is so worn out from the archaic PP GUI.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dirtyratstudios

Very happy with Sony Vegas.

Did you know that you can download the CS2 version of Premiere from the Adobe website with a serial number for free?

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

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Not legally unless you own the software...

The red text has only been added in the last few weeks. It didn't say that previously and there was much discussion about the software:

http://www.mobilemag.com/2013/01/14/...-free-sort-of/

Adobe killed the activation servers for CS2 late last year and all the blogs took what they said as meaning they are giving the software away for free. Adobe quickly clarified it that same day.

This is the original post that caused all the confusion.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1114930
Not sure why it took another month for bloggers to think Adobe was giving it away for free....

Since Adobe had to release new versions of the software for those that owned it to re-install, maybe that is what caused the confusion.

Attachment 4424

I saved an HTML copy of the page on January 12, 2013. Here is a screengrab of part of that page. You can see it doesn't have the red text or any other suggestion that the software can't be used. It has links to all the software to download, plus all the serial numbers (I left those out of the screengrab) and it is a public page on the official Adobe website.

Currently that page is number two for a Google search for "Adobe CS2", so many people will go straight to it. Just as I did back in January after reading the blog posts. Hardly surprising that people still thought Adobe was giving away the old software for free in January.

Must admit I didn't check the page again before posting the link on this thread. I got it from my bookmarks.

Sigh....

All is good. The day after all the blogs announced that CS2 was free. Adobe issued a statement saying that was not the case. Looks like Adobe messed up on a couple levels here -

#1 They retired the activation servers.
#2 They didn't communicate the situation well at all.

Quote:

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Initially it was believed the company got tired of keeping the activation servers running to support legitimate installs of ~8 year-old software and decided to give it away. But that's only partly true.

Turns out Adobe did retire the activation servers used by CS2 back in December, but when legitimate owners of the suite started complaining that without these servers they'd be unable to reinstall their copies if needed, the company began offering versions of CS2 that didn't need activation.

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Quote:

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Adobe later clarified that in order to legally use CS2 users still require a purchased license, and that the move was just meant to assist its existing customers. Yet the download page and serials are still live.

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http://www.techspot.com/news/51316-a...t-mean-to.html
Date - Jan 11, 2013

Posted on Adobe -

Quote:

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Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers provided as a part of the download may only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.

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http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations...n-servers.html
Date: Jan 11, 2013

Yeah. I know they had a page w/ serial numbers and no red text.

Looks like Adobe royally fucked up the activation servers and now have to offer downloads with a working serial number.

Is anyone using Final Cut X? Seems like they've added a lot of new feature. It looks like it may be good now that it does multi cam clips and DVD chapters. Looks like there may be a learning curve but I know I can't go on using Final Cut 7 forever.

I'll go FCX as soon as I know I can drop AVCHD files on a Sequence/Timeline, with no pre-conversion.

Looks like Apple has (actually) been listening to disgruntled users, regarding the Final Cut X debacle.

http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/...,2837576.story

Will be interesting to see if the results are real, or more Silicon Valley hype.

Premiere gives me a headache, but I use it because you can drop AVCHD files on the timeline with no pre-conversion. But the trade-offs are painful.

Since I am in Las Vegas, I'm going to (try) to go to the LAFCPUG event during NAB. That should bring this into focus.

I luv The Rio - I shot a popular movie there!

An update:

A month ago, I did several projects in FCP again, my 3 year old FCP 7, and promptly cancelled my Adobe Cloud subscription for Premiere Pro!

I gave the Adobe Cloud subscription and Premiere 9 months.

HD didn't cause any marked improvement in VOD sales, but it did cause delays in those HD releases going live. My three DVD-R On Demand sales portals - including myself - don't do Blu-Ray, so I had to create a separate SD video version anyway. And I author DVDs in Apple DVD Studio Pro anyway, because the learning curve for the GUI for Adobe Encore was not cost effective.

It will cost me $299 to buy the current Apple Final Cut Pro. (There used to be a 30-day free trial, which I didn't see at first glance this morning.) There's also a $10 App to covert FCP projects from 7 to X.

I spent $50/month for 9 months for the Premiere Pro Adobe Cloud subscription. I'd be $150 ahead had I not tried Premiere Pro, I did not learn anything new about editing, input file formats, media, output file formats, audio, for the $450 experience.

FCP now supports AVCHD file formats, which is the raw file format for modern Consumer and ProSumer cameras (video and still that also do video).

Apple bungled FCP for 2 years, but now it looks like they're back on track.

I also read somewhere else this morning that someone thinks Adobe Cloud subscriptions is brand new! I found it a year ago, and I never considered myself the first on the block.

Cloud subscription/subscribing is a great concept. Adobe software isn't necessarily, but the subscription vs purchase concept fits an age-old model adopted by the hardware side of the business decades ago - called equipment leasing.

Apple meets it half way, with far more cost effective Apps, and cloud backup of your purchase(s).

I'm going to get a new iMac and I'm thinking about switching to Final Cut 10 as well. The price is great and it seems like a lot of the features it was missing have been added back in (like multi clip editing). I hope Apple continues to support it and it continues to get even better.

How do you use Premiere Pro in the cloud? Uploading original camera files doesn't seem practical at all.

The Cloud Subscription allows you to use the CS6 software application programs. All of them: PhotoShop. Illustrator, DreamWeaver, Premiere and the rest.

You download them to your computer. All of your input/output data files are on your computer and hard drives.

If anything happens to your computer, you download the programs again. Once your subscription runs out, the programs stop working. Supposedly. Mine haven't yet.

The term "Cloud" is way over-used these days. The work is performed locally on your computer. Whether you would ever upload your files to a data storage service, is a separate matter.

One of the issues with the cloud services from my understanding is that you have to commit to 1 year of service. So that $49.95 a month subscription is a $599.4 fee I think.

And once you stop paying your Adobe product/s are deactivated when they check with the servers, which they do every 30 days. So you'd be renting the software instead of paying $600 once and getting updates until the next version comes out.

You can also get just Premiere Pro for $20 a month by itself, not sure if that carries a minimum of 1yr commitment or not.

The plus in the cloud offering is the offline storage, on Adobe's servers and being able to access your work from elsewhere and make edits using their mobile apps.

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Originally Posted by jIgG

The plus in the cloud offering is the offline storage, on Adobe's servers and being able to access your work from elsewhere and make edits using their mobile apps.

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Not much of an attraction except for people who are just chopping up small affiliate clips. Files of any quality will be far too big to upload and download. One minute of basic AVCHD footage is a 100Mb file. Why bother when you can have it on a harddrive or cheap 16Gb SD card?

Also I wonder if Adobe have any rules about what can be stored on their servers? Eg. no porn?

I haven't tried saving clips on Adobe's cloud.

I have the same concern about stuff suddenly not working, e.g. clips deleted, once they find out they're adult.

if you want to cancel your 1-year subscription, supposedly you contact them, pay 50% of the remaining term, and you're done.

Instead, I drew down the balance in my bank account so the bank wouldn't authorize the $49.99 monthly charge.

That seemed to work, too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dirtyratstudios

Not much of an attraction except for people who are just chopping up small affiliate clips. Files of any quality will be far too big to upload and download. One minute of basic AVCHD footage is a 100Mb file. Why bother when you can have it on a harddrive or cheap 16Gb SD card?

Also I wonder if Adobe have any rules about what can be stored on their servers? Eg. no porn?

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True, Adobe is trying to ride the wave into software renting. Their products are mature and I would imagine fewer and fewer people are upgrading after a new version comes out.

wouldn't know about the rules but I imagine anything that you want to put up on Behance will have a no porn rule. The cloud storage, who knows, considering there are professionals working with nudes.