Alright, I’ll admit it. Premiere is pretty decent these days.

I know a lot of people say that. The Internet is filled with love letters to Adobe. I haven’t really been among them, well, ever. I’ve almost always had bad experiences with Premiere, which I’ve documented a-plenty. Long story short (unless you go back and read my post where I lay it all out), Premiere was unstable as hell for me, Avid wasn’t accessible (physically, I could never get in front of one) and being technically proficient in SOMETHING was important to me. So my senior year of college, I learned everything I could about FCP and even got certified by Apple. A card carrying FCPFREAK except not really because the certification logo usage guide was like 18 pages long. I cut on FCP for 3 years professionally and enjoyed using it — until three months ago, when I came into a new job with Premiere. Creative Cloud actually went live on my first day of work. I used CS6 for a few hours, then CC forever and ever after.

And it’s added or eliminated a lot of stuff that used to drive me CRAZY. A lot of people really liked CS6 and I’ll agree it was an improvement but MAN, it was like a reanimated corpse in some ways. Nice to edit natively, but OMG WTF at some stuff — sorry to use so much industry lingo on you.

Obligatory comment about how story is more important than tools. Yes, we know.

So anyway, I know a lot of people are resisting Premiere because they don’t like past versions or they don’t like the idea of the Creative Cloud or subscription or whatever. Sure, perfectly valid reasons not to use software that don’t really concern me. I can’t stress enough how much I don’t want to argue about the cloud with you. But I thought that since I used to be so firmly in the “omg Premiere sucks so much I can’t even look at it” crowd and now I’m not so much, I should spread the word just in case. ‘Cause it really does save me a lot of time, I think.

The biggest thing for me that really makes me happy is not needing to transcode. In FCP, I transcoded all the things. I didn’t think this would be a big deal to me because I knew FCP’s quirks so well that managing media didn’t bug me. Well damn ya’ll, turns out when you can have a timeline with 6 different kinds of media on it without blinking, that’s pretty much okay.

Other stuff that was previously missing or annoying is gone — and well-covered in actual reviews that aren’t just confessionals. Coming straight from using FCP every day (or even Media Composer every night), there’s not really much about it that’s bothersome when it works as intended. The person to person support seems to be very good. Despite becoming a punching bag for a lot of people, Adobe is pretty flippin’ responsive. The help section sucks a lot, but luckily I don’t resort to that very much (not because I’m SMRT but because sites like uhm Creative COW do it a lot better anyway.)

The thing is, I still don’t really trust Premiere as much as I could. Sometimes weird things will happen and I’m not sure if it’s me or the software, or if it really happened. Renders unrender. In or out points go POOF. Disabled clips still act enabled until suddenly they don’t. Odd little bugs I can’t recreate and make me question my sanity, some of which have been around a long time. Even timecode issues. NBD though right, it’s not like timecode is important. At least when FCP tended to flip out, it did it noticeably.

Premiere is keeping up and trying to add new stuff without destroying the delicate little world an editor creates for his or herself, which I respect. But in its constant evolution, I feel like minor oddities that can become show stopping calamities are always a possibility. I never got that from FCP. For all its quirks and dinosaurness, I was always pretty sure that my timecode was accurate or my tested workflow wasn’t going to collapse in on itself.

(I’ll note that I am using Avid Media Composer for the feature I’m working on because it’s awesome for narrative, in my correct opinion.)

I suppose it’s sort of a risk and reward situation. FCP was a stable dinosaur, a friendly brontosaurus. But to keep it stable, you stay on older operating systems and older computers, and that’s not going to do you any good eventually. Premiere is uhm…the dinosaur that eats Newman. Or whatever. Point is it’s pretty awesome and so very fast, but watch out because it does spit toxic black stomach tar sometimes.

Honestly, my main concern with being a Premiere user is: am I inappropriately spoiling myself? Am I setting myself up for failure by no longer caring about the media the same way as I did before? Or is this what we should all come to expect, that we SHOULD be able to throw random r3ds and loose P2 junk around and let the software deal with it because life is short dammit? I’m nearly made to feel like a cheat for not spending half my life wrangling and managing media…but we have 64 bit phones so why is that my concern?

In summary, I guess I’m saying: Premiere CC is good stuff worth cautiously exploring, so don’t reject it because YOU’RE the dinosaur.