FCP, FCPX, or Premiere in school...

cojobt

Hi,

For the last few years I have been using Final Cut Pro on a Macbook Pro for video editing in a secondary school with Transition Year students. At the start of the year I take them off to a one day course to learn the basics of FCP, then they use it throughout the year for various projects, learning as they go.

I was fairly happy with this system until we got a couple of HD AVCHD camcorders. These seemed brilliant until it came to editing. While FCP7 now handles the files as ProRes, they become massive. Storage became a problem, as did producing SD DVDs (bear in mind, these are school projects - musicals, concerts, sports, which are then given to students/parents. BluRay is not really the standard yet). They looked terrible, and took a great many hours to produce. Various workflows including programs like Streamclip were employed, but the quality has always been embarrassingly low.

Last year, our school got a tech allocation and we bought 2 new iMacs and 2 copies of FCPro (the order went through before I became fully aware of the terrors of AVCHD and FCP. The iMacs were bought on my recommendation, which was based on research, experience and professional advice.

However, I am now unsure what to do. We have FCP Studio but I have not installed it, or even opened the package, as I have been reading that Premiere Pro CS5.5 is considerably better at handling AVCHD. As most consumers cams use this format, it's likely this will be our standard for years to come.

The problem is, CS5.5 is very expensive, as is FCP, and even FCPX (bearing in mind the limitations of school budgets).

With all this in mind, does anybody have any advice for me?

I know using FCP or Premiere in school is probably overkill, but I think it's a fair introduction to the art of editing for students who are interested in it.

Should I stick with the two copies of FCP7 that I have?
Should I return them and go with FCPX?
Is Premiere Pro the only way to go with Macs and AVCHD?
Should I just get a new job?

Any input or advice will be greatly appreciated.

cojobt

Although nobody seems to be interested, to close the discussion, I demoed Premiere Pro CS5.5 using AVCHD footage and it seems pretty damn nice, so we're gonna ditch Final Cut and go Premiere Pro...for now.

irishcanadian

Adobe Premier Pro is catching on, especially as Final Cut X is basically iMovie Pro which is useless for professionals as it's dos'nt have xml, edl, or tape support.
You are right about storage, Apple ProRes 4:2:2 HQ takes a lot of storage. Cant speak about making dvd's as we make them HDSR tapes once a project has been outputted to tape for QC.
On a budget Adobe Premier is the way to go.

cojobt

Well my students certainly aren't professionals, and neither am I for that matter, but I thought that if any of them plan or hope to work in film/video in future, they'd be better off with even the slightest grasp of FCP or Premiere...and so Premiere it is.

In the future I intend to minimise output to DVD, create an archive/master (on BluRay possibly), upload all public footage to YouTube on the school channel, and upload files (avi/h264/?) to the school server to allow tech-savvy students/families to do what they want with the finished versions.

This is not professional stuff, I just don't think secondary school output has to be antiquated and crap-looking.

Lump

AVC HD is generally a shocking format. It's only until the latest version of avid came out that it works well on Avid! Good luck! For your school server I wold suggest uploading Quicktimes, as they're most useful across editing systems.