Desktop Editing: Final Cut Pro Toppling Avid?

It’s a good read for anyone working with digital video editing or looking to start. Personally, I’ve worked with Adobe Premiere for a few years and am pretty happy with it. The article mentions Premiere in passing, noting that it’s relatively less stable than Final Cut. I haven’t worked with Final Cut myself, but will admit that the previous version of Premiere (5.1) could be unstable on either a PC or Mac, especially when working with DV format video. But with the new 6.0 version I’ve found it to be a remarkably stable and powerful tool on both platforms with a variety of hardware–including simple IEEE 1394 interfaces, dedicated DV interfaces (firewire, iLink), and analog capture cards. My current workhorse system is a dual-Pentium III Xeon machine with half a gig of RAM running Windows 2000 and it’s been stable as hell since the Premiere 6 upgrade. I’ll also note that Premiere tends to be cheaper than Final Cut, with a $600 retail price vs. Final Cut’s $995 price. And you can get Premiere bundled with capture cards and editing hardware for $700-$1000 complete. But if I were in a Mac-centric universe, I’d probably give Final Cut a try–quite simply Final Cut wasn’t yet available when we jumped into digital video editing at work.

But you can replace Final Cut Pro with the phrase “desktop editing” and the point of the article still rings true — inexpensive desktop PC hardware and software are closing in fast on more expensive proprietary video editing systems like Avid. The Pros, for whom cost is second to ultimate quality, may not care and stick with expensive Avid systems. But for those just scraping by, it’s an important trend indeed.