10 Reasons Not to Buy Adobe Premiere
Your Video Deserves Better
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.
(6) Or the After Effects hype, either.
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!
(9) Adobe knows the score.
Adobe is so willing to acknowledge being trounced by Final Cut Pro that they've withdrawn Premiere for Macintosh and made Adobe Photoshop a default, compatible program with Final Cut Pro Studio's suite of applications. If they know the program's future is slipping, shouldn't you?
(10) It's holding you back.
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.
Published by A. Bertocci
Adam is a writer, filmmaker and humorist who writes about media, movies, pop culture and the greatest city ever founded. View profile
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- Adobe Premiere provides less bang for the buck.
- It has lost ground to its competitors that will be hard to make up.
- It is not an accepted industry standard as Final Cut Pro or Avid are.
6 Comments
Post a CommentFunny that Premiere is the only program addressing editing RED full resolution files without having to transcode (actually accesses the full RED file). What's up, Final Cut?
What a bizarre piece of Adobe fanboyism. I can quote industry leaders too. Though I can't say for sure if they are incentive partners of Adobe which I know for a fact Creative Cow is. I am an invited guest to VES every single year for the philanthropic work I do for students aspiring to be in Post Production. Few, if any, use Premier. Final Cut Studio was given an award at the Sundance and Indie Canada for what is has done for amateurs and professionals alike. Martin Scoresese, Deniss Murren,Walter Murch and many others "actually in the industry" all swear by Final Cut Studio. Not Adobe. Adobe's products are over priced and extremely lackluster. Integration across products simply does not exist. It's as if each product was made by an entirely different development team. FCS is so seamless that I do not have to export parts of my Final Cut project to Motion. I just blade the in and out points, right click and send to anyone of the other apps. No such thoughtfulness with Adobe. You and
I don't agree with you one bit. I feel the same way and I am not threatened by Premier's possible success. Although Adobe's fascist approach to technology does scare me. When was the last time you visited Adobe's web site? It is nothing short of a tragedy! Navigation is impossible, product specs and system requirements are impossible to find, there is no simple check out button because they don't sell directly on their web site (due to incentives to other advertisers) they encourage others to advertise their products, you have to give DNA and your first born just to download a demo version etc, etc. Adobe should go under for their approach to business. They lack ingenuity so badly, that they had to outright purchase Macromedia that was threatening their own existence with good technology. I will stick to FInal Cut which is far superior to both Premier and equivalent Avid solutions. Not to forget that you can get the entire Final Cut studio for just $200 more than Adobe's lackluster pro
This reads as if the author is threatened by the astonishing and rapid success that Premiere Pro 2.0 and Adobe Production Studio are enjoying since they shipped in January. There is always room for a BETTER (and in this case much more complete) solution to challenge the incumbent Avid and Apple software. Watch out for Adobe to continue to challenge and succeed Mr. Bertocci.
Yeah this is a crap article.I notice there's no commenting on the editing tools themselves- I've cut on both Final Cut and Premiere Pro and find that doing things like j-cuts and l-cuts and working with the audio tracks in Premiere to be much faster and more intuitive than Final Cut.
Additionally, point number 3 is a simple lie. Yes, there are some hardware requirements but Premiere does not make you "wait to render everything", it's real time effects and transitions work extremely well even on my 3 year old Dell Inspiron laptop.
But why bother trying to refute an article which is clearly trying to be a whitewash.
What a bizarre piece of Apple fan-boy advocacy.
Price. Sure -- compare the full price of Premiere Pro with the academic Final Cut Studio. On earth you compare the two academic prices (Premiere $279 - Final Cut $799) or the full prices (Premiere $849 - Final Cut Studio #1,299). Oh, and Premiere also is available as part of a suite -- bundled along with a few apps you may have heard of -- Photoshop, After Effects Pro -- $1,199. Atleast with Adobe you still have the option of buying the different products for different tasks separately. With Apple its all or nothing.
Rather than make this comment longer than the original post I'll quote the industry leaders. Creative Cow gave Premiere Pro 4/12 out of 5 stars, concluding it's a formidable upgrade, offering integration not available anywhere else in the industry. Charlie White at Digital Video Producer said it was a great overhall to an already great application. Byte called it an astonishing array of video tools for the des