Or more accurately

How Adobe Premiere Pro will be the death of me.

I am an FCPX editor. I fucking love the freedom of X. But I have recently been forced into moving to Premiere. Anyone who has read the previous posts on my experience in working with a Avid after so many years will know how I feel about editing at the speed of thought.

So now that I am editing in Premiere again, I spent many years with it, from version 5 way back in the 1990s, and I feel it necessary to make my aggravations known. First off I’m running a maxed out spec late 2015 iMac. It’s a very powerful beast and I have not had a days trouble with it since I bought it. I run FCPX and logic and Resolve daily and never have issues.

Now I’m running Premiere I’m finding all sorts of problems with memory lag and general slow down of services when Premiere is open. But while that frustrates the fuck out of me this is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t normally do this but below is a list of heinous crimes against humanity that I take for granted in FCPX. Oh and this is only Day one of actually a full days work in Premiere. For the past week I’ve been working in X and sending XMLs across to deliver a Premiere Project file. But this is now negated because of point number 10 below.

1. I can set a keyboard shortcut for link ‘clips’ but not unlink ?????????????? And this is something I constantly need to do now because clips are not connected like they are in X.

2. To move audio in subframes or as Adobe calls it, Audio Units, I now have to toggle this on in the timeline, however this is now always moving in Audio Units, so to navigate by frame again, I have to untick the move in audio units toggle.

3. Unable to map my zoom shortcuts to Command plus and minus, that changes the size of the video track regardless of what I do.

4. When opening a project again it rebuilds all the audio peak files and destroys the speed of the machine so that it’s pretty much unusable until it’s finished. Well then it has to catch up on the 4 million clicks I did trying to do something, like rename a sequence or something.

5. Exporting locks down the programme so you have to wait for the export to finish before you can carry on working.

6. It renders everything before it exports ?????????????????????

7. It’s slow to open, even slower to close and pretty much renders the iMac useless until it has completely shut down all it’s activity.

8. The graphics panel is a fucking nightmare, even after doing an online training series.

9. iXML is not supported in the timeline so I have no idea who’s mic is who’s when editing.

10. I have to work with subtitles a lot because most of what I do has embedded English language subs required for broadcast. The broadcaster wants embedded because the audience are not always up to speed on how to use CC or switch subs on and off on their Sat Boxes. Working with subs in Premiere and moving to X and back again is not possible as the graphics panel in Premiere does not play well with others. It’s just a black colour box in X. I can get titles out of X but the company I work for refuse to generate the subs in X as they are a Premiere workflow company. Fine.

11. My absolute favourite, there is no magnetic timeline. Sure I can grab what I need and use the command modifier key while dragging but it moves everything out the way, so any music or FX at the point of moving either gets split or moved completely out of the way if there is an overlap. It creates a giant big fucking hole.

12. I now have to make sure I have the track I want to keep from being overwritten, disabled or it gets overwritten. Had that happen a few times when I was bringing in subtitles onto the timeline, even from another sequence. Where they are on channel 7.

So this is just after a full day in Premiere. Now I know I need to give it more time, but unlike Avid where I always accepted that Avid has not changed in the last zillion years, Premiere is supposed to be the flagship all bells and whistles application that is going to revolutionise the world of editing, and my theory is that it will, purely by killing off every editor that prefers working at the speed of thought in X to working in the bloated, toxic mess that is Premiere “Pro”. Or just by not breathing during that last sentence.

Anyway wish me luck as I venture out into the big bad world. I have never been more unhappy.

Peace love and vomit

Jayce

PS. Adobe Premiere Pro sucks fish balls.