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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Final Cut Pro vs. Adobe Premiere Pro: Round 3

In the early rounds it looked like Adobe Premiere CS5 had scored a knock-out blow with it's ability to easily edit H.264 files without need for transcoding. Though you can edit H.264 files from DSLRs in Final Cut without transcoding to ProRes first, it can get tedious as the program constantly wants to Render the content before playing.

I admit to being biased; as a long time Premiere user who switched to Final Cut when Adobe stopped Mac support a few years back, I've been loath to jump back, but I kept hearing these good things about Premiere CS5.

Another important detail; I'd heard some time ago people saying that you shouldn't edit natively in Final Cut because of issues with decompression/recompression, and I had wondered whether Premiere had any of the same problems. But when I didn't hear anyone mention it, I assumed not...

So at the risk of being too easily lead by my own prejudices, I am intrigued by this article from Paul Joy where he tries exporting a video from Final Cut and Premiere, and then compares the results. Paul started with the thesis mentioned by many Premiere supporters that "recompression always makes it worse; therefore Premiere must do a better job," but what he found was that the results he got were better from Final Cut.

Let the battle continue...

Paul Joy: HDSLR Encoding Wars – Premiere Pro vs Final Cut Pro

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