Which NLE Do You Use for Professional Post?

[Michael Shu]

Okay, a loaded question for you guys. I'm doing a tiny bit research about what working professionals use to edit their footage these days as the effects of Apple's move to FCPX affect a sector of the industry.

What NLE do you use (or are in the process of transitioning to) for editing your footage (Red or otherwise) and why?

[Sergio Perez]

There are some options missing. You should add autodesk smoke, flame. For example , I do my draft edit and smaller projects a split between FCP7 and Adobe CS 5.5 (starting to use it), but when I'm working on higher end stuff like international tvc's I finish in Smoke or flame, depending on budget, of course.

[Tom Lowe]

Premiere!

[Michael Shu]

Hi Sergio, good point I should have put an Other option. Too late now I think :-( sorry about that. But we'll let the forum replies be the "other" field I guess? :)

Please also let's share in what context we use this. I'm actually going to use this as a point of discussion in a class I teach to a film school administration.

For Onyx Cinema, we still use final cut 7, but after testing the updates of X are now in serious consideration of CS6

[J.D. Frey]

I use premiere because:

1. It is incredibly easy to set up and cut a 4k project
2. It is inexpensive
3. You can cut small projects on a laptop, imac, or other computer with less horsepower
4. Native R3D support with RMD support for meta data choices
5. Red rocket support

[Michael Shu]

Cool cool. I think it's worth asking everybody what types of projects they use the NLE and if work for a larger company that uses a standard at all.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I use FCP7 in my main working facility. It's still a good editing program, although it's starting to show it's age.

I'm using FCP X also at the moment. I also have a Production Premium from Adobe, that I bought during the Switch Promotion.
CS6 looks interesting, but I don't like editing in Premiere all that much. From what I've seen, CS6 looks a lot better in this regard, with a much cleaner interface. But at this point, I'll wait to upgrade, because I'm more interested in FCP X at the moment.

Yes, it looks like I'm the only one. It misses a lot of functionality, it's incomplete in a lot of ways, but it also has a lot of good things going for it, and once you wrap your head around it, you can edit sometimes wicked fast in it. I'm just interested more in how this will grow for the moment.

[Phil Holland]

Premiere Pro. It's made and saved me a lot of money. Every Red owner should own Adobe Production Premium CS6 in my opinion.

[Adam Beck]

Premiere Pro. It's made and saved me a lot of money. Every Red owner should own Adobe Production Premium CS6 in my opinion.

+1

CS6 has been a huge leap forward. There is room for improvement; but they are doing a lot of things right, especially when it comes to RAW workflows and metadata.

[Bruce Allen]

Avid because it is the only editor with proper collaboration tools - eg multiple editors can work on a project at once.

At mOcean, we couldn't have managed 2 trailers for The Avengers, the SuperBowl ad and a ton of TV spots in the time we did, at the quality we did... without a team of people working together, using Avid.

Personally, I use it at home because it still has the best pure storytelling editing tools - best trim tool, best script-based editing tools, etc.

Premiere is getting there but once you actually want to collaborate it is just a total failure at the moment. Sorry. Also, I don't like rear-loading the rendering of the project so much. Working in "realtime 4K" and then having a 36-hour render at the end is not fun and they have no decent intermediate format a la Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD.

I look forward to evaluating FCP X properly once it actually has a professional source and record monitor view and certain other basic things. Having your whole project as a relational database could be great for collaboration in the future, but nothing is implemented yet, so as of today it is a total fail too for my uses.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com