The cost of plug-ins

One of the things most anyone changing from FCP to Avid or Adobe has to face is the cost of plug-ins. From owning an Avid years ago, the price for your average plug-in was steep. Don't know if this is still the case. Something I'll miss with the FCP community is plug-in developers for the program - used Joe's Filters for years and Nattress' filters were great and an incredible bargain. I see that Red Giant is going to port Colorista II to Avid, but I wonder at what premium?

Ask them:

[www.redgiantsoftware.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I've started doing a few projects in PPro rather than Final Cut since the debacle. I was one of "those guys" who had PPro on the hard drive with the Production Premium package but never opened it. Of course, that meant that I didn't own any plugins or filters for PPro. Because I'm a heavy After Effects user, I took advantage of the Adobe Dynamic Link and brought my sequences into AE and went from there. I've found I'm not really missing the plugins that I would use regularly in FCP because I can do as much or more within After Effects. Granted it's not as easy as dragging and dropping on to your clip all the time, but there's much more control of the effects and they'll immediately update in the PPro timeline.

Bill,

Thanks for the reply. I have AE, but I'm switching to Avid for my editing platform and the round trip is more of a pain than with FCP, as I'm sure you know. Maybe I'll down load the PP trial and give it a spin, but it doesn't sound great in terms of media management.

I wonder if there's a decent Avid AAF to AE translator other than Automatic Duck, or if we all have to go the PPro route.



www.strypesinpost.com

PP Dynamic Link is seemless. Change it in AE / updates in PP.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

"Seamless" is putting too fine a point on it, in my opinion. I've relatively little experience with it, but the fact that the "replace with After Effects comp" feature doesn't put handles on is pretty much inexcusable.

And RJ, the best way to think of media management in Premiere is that it doesn't have any. At all. Just banish the thought of media management from your mind entirely, and you'll be fine.

I've been using Premiere and Avid quite a bit for just the past couple weeks, and I've come to the conclusion that I wish they would get drunk and have a baby together. Premiere has some very nice features for rapid turnaround, and the fact that you can interoperate with After Effects ? even though it's far from perfect ? is a nice bonus. On the other hand, Avid has actual media management with actual bins and actual metadata columns and an actual editing environment. So it's a trade-off, really. And in my weaker moments, I despair that in this day and age it still has to be.

Just keep making feature requests. There is a large body of disaffected FCP users and it's in their interests to listen to us.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Yes, I've been talking to the Adobe guys. Like literally; they called me up one day a few weeks ago to chat. They've definitely got the right attitude. They have no misconceptions; they know that while their NLE has promise, it presently sucks out loud. They say they're working hard to change that, and I've no reason not to believe them.

But it's a long road from Premiere CS5.5 to some hypothetical future pro-level NLE. They've got massive driver-compatibility issues to work out, they've got a gaping hole where their media management infrastructure ought to be, the fact that you don't actually get to see finished pixels until you do a non-interactive, non-real-time render has got to change and like yesterday ? so while I won't say they couldn't get there, I will say they're not there yet. And they know that, which is good.

Avid, on the other hand, has just been ridiculous lately. They've been doing what, two major releases a year? I haven't used 5.5 ? I've been borrowing a 5.0 system to hone my skills ? so I can't speak to it, but I don't think we should discount what 6.0 will bring, nor should we underestimate how soon Avid's gonna drop it on us.

It's an interesting time to be in the industry, that's for damn sure.

>They've been doing what, two major releases a year?

There were 2 key features in 5.5. 1) the ability to export AAFs from AMA media, and 2), Avid's first proper search tool (it is a $500 bucks option for non-upgrade deals). Seriously, there are things I like about avid, but c'mon, a search tool for 500 bucks?



www.strypesinpost.com

You mean PhraseFind, right? I read somewhere or other that it's a licensed technology, and Avid chose to pass on the gouging to which they're being subjected to just those customers who choose to be gouged, rather than spreading the gouging out into a thin, unpleasant paste and then making us all have a taste.

That could just be a rumor, though.

Nope, it's true. They license Nexidia technology for PhraseFind. This is the same technology used in Get for Final Cut Pro, which Nexidia recently pulled the plug on:
[provideocoalition.com]

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

LOL.

Jeff Harrell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've come to the conclusion that I wish they would
> get drunk and have a baby together.

God - I feel the same. Everything else is so not-quite-right. I've come to the conclusion that I Don't Actually Want to Have to Change, Thanks. So if we could all hop in some kind of time machine, go back a couple of years and punch up some FCP developers before they lose the plot, I'd really appreciate it.

I think given the choice right now I'd likely go to Lightworks, if it were available on Mac and I knew I could integrate with everyone else in my pipelines. Although I'm still waiting on the new Mac Pro to see if it's worth jumping there too.

When I built my time machine, that's not what I used it for. Just so you know.

And by the way. Domesticated dogs? Yeah. You're welcome.

Sadly, I can't run my business on a domesticated dog. But thanks. They are quite lovely.

You know, if I did have a time machine I think I seriously would take a sampler of FCPX blogs back with me to Cupertino. This whole thing is such a pain in the ass.

Remember, you don't need to switch from FCP 7 just yet. It's still got life in it. Adobe has borrowed a lot of features from FCP already and I'm hoping they'll borrow even more for CS 6, although I still think my long-form future is Avid.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

So far the cost of plug-ins has been pretty minimal because the Adobe Suite works pretty seamlessly with Dynamic Link so we can round trip to AE and such quite easily. And our nice package of AE plug-ins now work with our really nice NLE (Premiere Pro) so I have not had to purchase any specific plug-ins just for Premiere Pro.

We were going to make our first major switch to Premiere Pro in the fall but after that app was able to save two projects in one day, our editors are ready to make the switch much sooner. For one project, we did not have the proper BPAV or XML files for the Sony XDCAM footage sent to us nor did the shooter still have them, Premiere Pro can read the raw files without any additional info. Then the same thing happened with an AVCHD project. All we had were .mts files, nothing else. Again, Premiere Pro can read and edit with the raw files. In both cases, FCP 7 threw up the "File Structure Not Supported" error in Log and Transfer.

Switching to Premiere Pro has been a no brainer. What we'll probably end up with by next year is a mix of Premiere Pro and Avid MC6 provided that MC6 really does work with our AJA Kona boards by next year.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Quote
walterbiscardi said
Adobe Suite works pretty seamlessly with Dynamic Link so we can round trip to AE and such quite easily.

Watch it Walter...Jeff don't like the word "seemless" with AE Dynamic Link

Quote
Jude Cotter said
I've come to the conclusion that I Don't Actually Want to Have to Change

Bravo. Being FORCED to make a change sucks big fat eggs. I am pi$$ed that we even have to talk about it. We were all plugging along in our nice efficient ways...just hoping for some useful upgrades...and get t-boned by a manhattan bus. This does suck.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Get was pretty promising. What I didn't like was how it worked with FCP, but that was an FCP limitation. It made the workflow fairly clunky. With regards to Avid's search function, I have come to expect a search function by keywords to be a mandatory requirement of a modern software. By god, we've had a search tool since System 7. In FCP, I can do keyword searches either in the browser, in the effects palatte, the timeline, in OS X's Finder or even in Textwrangler or TextEdit with an XML. In Avid, I can't do any of that. I can only sift through individual bins and that is prehistoric.



www.strypesinpost.com