- I recently did a video comparing render times
in Adobe Premiere on three of the top laptops
that I could get a hold of:
the MacBook Pro, 15-inch with Touch Bar,
all the way specc'd out,
the Surface Book with Performance Base,
all the way specc'd out,
and a gaming laptop from a company called Razer.
The laptop's called the Razer Blade.
Now again, this was not meant to be a laptop comparison.
It was simply showcasing a task that I do every single day
in Premiere on these different machines
to kind of illustrate how that works on those machines.
In that video, it was pretty apparent that the Razer Blade
just kinda whooped the rest of their butts.
It also happens to have the most powerful GPU in it,
and, go figure, it was able to do the super graphics
intensive job of rendering footage the fastest.
The MacBook, on the other hand, which is probably
the laptop most people think of when they think
of editing video, but also has the least
most powerful graphics card, did the worst.
Now, you would think, that's pretty definitive, right?
It's not.
(hip hop groove)
While it is true that if you were using Premiere
and you're just looking for the speed and performance
of using the footage as well as the speed
of rendering times, then the other laptops are definitely
gonna be better for you than the new MacBook Pro.
But, as I briefly mentioned at the end of that video,
if you use Final Cut, all of that goes out the window.
Let me show you what I mean.
Here are the times from the original video.
Now, here is the MacBook Pro running the same four minutes
of 4.6K footage from my Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K
out at the same codec and resolution of the Premiere test,
which is the equivalent of the 4K YouTube preset.
27 minutes in Premiere becomes about five minutes
in Final Cut, and is even less than half the time
of the winning Razer Blade 2016.
Crazy, right?
As far as I can tell, though, from talking to a bunch
of professional editors, who edit for feature films,
for TV, at production houses, you name it,
they do a lot of editing ...
It comes down to optimization.
Apple makes the software, Final Cut Pro.
They also make the hardware, in this case, the Macbook Pro,
and in doing that, they can actually do a lot more
optimizations between the two than, say, Premiere,
which runs on a ton of different machines,
and Windows, which is also on a ton of different machines,
different hardware manufacturers, et cetera.
So, why would you use Premiere
if Final Cut is so much faster?
Well, besides personal preference, which does play a part
in just workflow and how you like to use it,
there are a few factors that kept coming up
every time I asked editors this exact question.
Also, there were editors that told me
why Premiere was better
and ones that told me why Final Cut was better,
and they're both not wrong.
Let's just point that out.
We'll get into that later.
They're not wrong.
But I wanna just go through really quick the pros
to each of them so that everybody kind of understands
why you would choose Premiere or Final Cut over the other.
First up, Final Cut Pro 10.
As mentioned, the optimization of the software
built specifically for the hardware
makes it probably the fastest editing program in the world,
so speed is a huge factor.
Because of those optimizations, by the way, that help
with speed, they also help with battery life, so this is
another factor for people that are using Final Cut Pro.
The magnetic timeline.
For a lot of editors, this actually is not a feature,
it is a gripe.
Most of them have come from the world of Final Cut 7 or any
other editing software, and they're using to have tracks.
They're used to just having a bunch of different tracks
to where they could put the video, the audio,
and all that other stuff.
So when Final Cut 10 was released and it got rid of that
and gave this magnetic thing ...
People were not happy.
But, when it's used in conjunction with some features
in Final Cut Pro 10; for example, Auditions,
you can select multiple takes of a clip,
have them easily swap in and out
in a specific part of the video with the timeline
automatically adjusting everything around it,
even if the clips are all different lengths.
Lastly, a better UI.
Simply put, Final Cut Pro 10
is more intuitive than Premiere.
Common actions that might take multiple clicks in Premiere
just take less in Final Cut 10.
Beyond that, it's just a cleaner-looking interface
that quote-unquote gets out of your way when editing.
Now, as far as Adobe Premiere is concerned, here were
the points that editors kept bringing up in favor of that.
The track-based editing allows for editors
to better organize their footage.
All the sound effects for the clip can go on one track,
all of camera one on one,
camera two on another,
background music on one,
vocals on another, et cetera.
This allows for things like adjusting the audio of just
one track a whole lot easier and just makes it a lot more
organized and easier to look at your footage and get
through it and know where you wanna make changes, et cetera.
It works with every format, codec, and on every machine.
You could throw an .mp4, an .avi, .mov, some RED footage,
five different audio formats, and will all run cohesively.
Not to mention you can run it on a PC, on Mac,
any number of different machines,
regardless of the manufacturer of that machine.
It can also output in every format, codec, et cetera.
So there's a giant list of options,
and for someone just outputting to YouTube,
that might not matter.
But, for example, editors cutting a commercial
for a television network might need to output their video
in .omf format to give to the audio guy
who then is going to take that and be able to work natively
in Pro Tools with the audio that was in
the editor's timeline, et cetera.
So.
Much.
Color grading.
While in Final Cut you can use plugins to get
a lot of different color grading options,
Premiere has a huge, robust set
of color grading options built right in.
If you are a YouTuber who's just using the color
straight out of your camera, it's not the biggest deal,
but if you're shooting raw or log footage,
and you need to put the color back in, as well as maybe
use lots and adds shades of color for emotional manipulation
of the audience, it's a bigger deal.
The Suite of Adobe.
When you get a Creative Cloud account with Adobe,
you get all of their software,
programs like Audition, which is used
for professional audio editing, After Effects,
which is used for professional motion graphics, et cetera.
Not only that, but any files from any Adobe program
like After Effects or Audition can be pulled
into your video's timeline, and if you edit them back
in After Effects, for example, it will update
in real-time in the timeline.
And finally, collaboration options or working in a team.
Premiere is just better at being used by groups.
Project files can easily be shared
with proxies of the footage on everyone's machine,
edited and updated in realtime across all the editors,
using Team Project files.
The footage, the formats, as mentioned before ...
Everything you want it to do that you would then need to
maybe hand off to a different department, a color corrector,
the audio guy, whatever ...
It's just a lot easier to do with Premiere, because it's
just so much more universally able to be accepted
by everyone else's machines and programs, et cetera.
Render times ...
Final Cut is pretty much gonna win, most of the time.
It's just hard to beat that optimization
of the software with the hardware.
Now, you can build a machine, especially a Windows machine,
that will have equivalent render times, et cetera,
using Premiere, but it's gonna take
a lot more power to do that.
So, Premiere kind of sacrifices the speed and all of that
optimization for being able to be more universally accepted,
be used on more machines, and actually have
a little bit more functionality in it as well.
At the end of the day, like any other equipment
that a filmmaker or an editor would use to have their film
become a reality, your editing program is just another tool
to get that job done.
So in the same way you might use one camera
or a lens for a specific project
or look or whatever you were trying to get,
there is no best editing program.
There is maybe a best editing program
for your specific project's needs.
There you go, guys.
Adobe versus Final Cut.
I know you all have a lot of opinions about this.
Please let me know in the comments below.
Try to be nice, though.
Constructive is good.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
(hip hop groove)