I’ve been editing exclusively with Adobe Premiere for over 12 years now, but today, I decided to try Final Cut Pro for a real project. Final Cut impressed me.
User interface
After watching a few tutorials on YouTube, I got started with Final Cut Pro right away without being too confused. There is no doubt that Premiere is much more complex than Final Cut. There are a lot of extra windows and tools in Premiere that I will probably never use for my simple projects, and this complexity can be daunting for new users. I also found that navigating around Final Cut Pro felt a little easier. I didn’t jump around from corner to corner of the screen like I found myself doing in Premiere.
I feel that no matter how huge my computer screens are, they will never be big enough for Adobe Premiere and I have never understood how people can edit videos on laptops, but for the first time First, I’ve found the editing feature in Final Cut Pro very comfortable on my 14-inch laptop screen. It can be said that the project that I am working on is very simple.
Replay
I mostly just edit at double speed in Premiere, and I’m sad to say it’s completely unusable on my new MacBook Pro M1. The footage can play smoothly for a second at double speed, but after that it freezes and when I press spacebar to stop playing, the footage stops and the software freezes while the audio stays on. continue for up to 10 seconds before. The sound stops and the software is usable again. This also happens on some Windows machines I’ve used, but it’s never been this bad. To get around this, I’ve gotten into the habit of creating proxies before starting to edit any projects. Sometimes this takes just a few minutes, while other times it can take more than an hour if the project is large enough. This is annoying, but I’m used to it.
Editing in Final Cut Pro is amazingly quick. Not only was my footage stutter-free, but it was handled perfectly without any additional rendering or proxy building. When I add effects to the clip, the footage will have a significantly lower resolution for a few seconds (when it’s rendered in the background), but it will always play and scan smoothly before and after the footage returns. should be sharp. This proved to me that my computer was fast enough to play back my relatively small 4K 100 Mbps footage at 2x the speed, but Adobe’s software was a weak link.
Timeline
Timelines work differently in Premiere and Final Cut. Moving one clip above another in Premiere will delete the bottom clip, while it will move footage in Final Cut. While both programs are capable of mimicking the other by holding down the command and option buttons, the way they work has encouraged me to edit in a different way. In Premiere I tend to move “up” in my timeline, placing the footage above the video clips higher so I don’t accidentally delete anything, but in Final Cut I naturally keep the timeline My space was neater and I ended up using only three videos.
This “magnetic timeline” in Final Cut is definitely better for managing space on my small laptop screen, but I was wondering what I would do on a much more complex project.
Effect
I didn’t spend much time comparing effects in both programs, but the two I tested were significantly better in Final Cut Pro. Warp Stabilizer can be incredibly slow in Premiere, but with just one click and a few seconds the “stabilization” feature in Final Cut is done.
Another “effect” that I use in almost every project is panning and zooming on still footage (Ken Burns effect). In Premiere this is done manually with keyframes, while in Final Cut it is done much faster with a smooth user interface.
complementary
I’m no expert when it comes to Adobe Premiere plugins. Honestly, I tried to stay away from them because they gave me a lot of trouble in the past.
Motion VFX is the sponsor of a video project I’m editing in Final Cut, and they asked me to use their plugins to produce the final video. I was shocked by how easy the software was to install, how easy it was to use in Final Cut, and how good the results were.
Like I said, I haven’t used many plugins in Premiere, but the Motion VFX in Final Cut Pro works better than anything else I’ve tried.
Export
Exporting footage in Final Cut Pro is again noticeably faster than exporting in Premiere. I’ve heard that Apple “optimized” Final Cut to work better with their hardware, and I’ve always assumed that’s fine, but it’s certainly true.
The deal breaker
Final Cut Pro is better than I could have imagined, but I won’t switch to it. First of all, Fstoppers owns about 12 Windows computers, and we all have to use the same software. If I switch to Final Cut, no one else will be able to open a project I’ve worked on in the future, but this is not the main reason.
My main frustration with Final Cut is that it can’t open multiple timelines at once. I like to have two or more timelines open in Premieres and I drag and drop footage between them. Because I couldn’t do this in Final Cut, I was forced to zoom in and out of the timeline and then battle the timeline as I dragged the footage from the five o’clock point on the timeline past the 1 o’clock mark, just to mess around and lose my place, over and over again. This single problem has wasted hours of my life on this single project.
I’m sure there’s another, faster way to edit in Final Cut but I feel like I’ve built up a style over the past decade that I’ll have a hard time relearning.
Inference
If you’re thinking about getting into video editing and you own a Mac, I strongly recommend Final Cut over Premiere. It’s cheaper, faster and easier. However, if you are working on large projects, or you need to share the project with Windows machines in the future, or you want to edit across multiple timelines at once, Premiere is your only choice. .
That being said, I hear Davinci Resolve is possibly the best of both worlds and it works on Mac and Windows. Maybe I should try.
