Motion Graphics Designer Richard Harrington jumped from Final Cut Pro 7 and had already been looking at Adobe Premiere Pro as a back up plan.
"The big advantage with Adobe's Premiere Pro that brought us across was they were first out of the gate as a 64-bit application," admits Harrington. "The video industry has become increasingly price-challenged. If I can get the job done faster I can make more money. Removing barriers like transcoded workflows where others would balloon files to eight to twelve times their size just so I can work with them, doesn't fly."
"Premiere Pro has really changed a great deal," he adds. "Adobe is clearly a hungry company that is listening to criticism and requests, and responding quickly. The Adobe Premiere Pro team participates in Facebook groups, not just logging the comments but listening to them and taking action.”
"Video has the greatest demands for real-time processing and real-time workflow and that can be tough. Then bringing in RAW formats and 10 and 12-bit codecs, greater color depth and time effects acceleration, Adobe has really been at the forefront of that move. Looking at how great Photoshop and After Effects have been for years and watching how smoothly Premiere Pro works with them, it really becomes clear at this point that Adobe is the last suite standing,” he adds. “That's not to say that when you look around there aren't other choices, because there are. But Adobe has been at the forefront of development and support for this very tight market.”
RHED Pixel produces a lot of training material, mainly featuring themselves, but also for larger clients like Pearson, Lynda.com, and some talk show style material as well. “For these kinds of jobs, the real standout is Premiere Pro, with the Adobe Media Encoder. In all cases, it just edits quick, looks great with a beautiful UI,” says Harrington. “All kinds of workflow shortcuts are accelerating our pace and making us look even better. The more efficient we are, the more money we make. That’s the bottom line. You choose the tools, they make the work more enjoyable and they make you more profitable. If they can do both, then that’s a good thing.”
Andrew Knight runs an independent film production company in Melbourne Australia called Fragile Films. They have produced two feature films, as well as working on several other short form productions and some corporate work to keep the cash-flow going. As a two person production house, Fragile is pretty small, but they employ subcontractors in as the productions come along, including compositing, VFX as well as camera operation.
The Stolen, the major production, co-produced with Avalon Films, was shot on the RED One camera in 2008. “At the time, the only workflow was with Final Cut Pro,” explains Knight. “And it wasn’t really giving the sort of performance we would have expected out of the eight-core Mac Pro we had provided for it. Then Adobe Premiere Pro came out with its ‘RED’ plugin. We were doing two blocks of preliminary post for the movie we were on and I thought I’d give Adobe Premiere Pro a try. It didn’t take much to decide to switch across to Premiere as soon as we could and have been there with Adobe ever since.”
