Final Cut Studio 2 vs Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium
I'm a TV/film producer and director. At work I use Final Cut Pro. At home I use a very old (non-upgradable) version of Photoshop for photographic & illustration projects.
Over the next year I want to combine my professional and private interests by incorporating more animation and post-production effects into my work. This is gonna mean a lot of working at home.
My dilemma is this: Privately, I can afford either Adobe Creative Suite P.P. or Final Cut Studio 2. Not both.
Final Cut Studio has Final Cut Pro and Motion which are great, but Aperture can't yet compete with Photoshop and currently there's no Mac substitute for Flash.
Adobe Creative Suite has After Effects, Flash and Photoshop but professionally, Premiere is dead in the water and although subpar in some areas, Motion can do things After Effects can't.
Is there anyone else who uses this software professionally and has an informed opinion on which package to go for and why?
Thanks.
Over the next year I want to combine my professional and private interests by incorporating more animation and post-production effects into my work. This is gonna mean a lot of working at home.
My dilemma is this: Privately, I can afford either Adobe Creative Suite P.P. or Final Cut Studio 2. Not both.
Final Cut Studio has Final Cut Pro and Motion which are great, but Aperture can't yet compete with Photoshop and currently there's no Mac substitute for Flash.
Adobe Creative Suite has After Effects, Flash and Photoshop but professionally, Premiere is dead in the water and although subpar in some areas, Motion can do things After Effects can't.
Is there anyone else who uses this software professionally and has an informed opinion on which package to go for and why?
Thanks.
Comments
Final Cut Studio has Final Cut Pro and Motion which are great, but Aperture can't yet compete with Photoshop and currently there's no Mac substitute for Flash.
Adobe Creative Suite has After Effects, Flash and Photoshop but professionally, Premiere is dead in the water and although subpar in some areas, Motion can do things After Effects can't.
The last time I tried Motion, I absolutely hated it. It was slow and very unstable even on a quad G5 with Geforce 6600 w 256MB VRam and 4GB Ram. I'm used to using quite powerful software like Shake and Motion felt like a kids toy.
Motion 3 I haven't used yet but the videos show some incredible capability so it looks like they've done a hell of a lot of work since the earlier versions. It seems they are taking parts from Shake to use in Motion too like the tracking features.
I do know however that After Effects is tried and tested through the film and motion graphics industry and it runs very well on the Intel machines. Motion is still a newcomer. Photoshop and Flash are also great products to have in your workflow.
Where I work we use CS3 for our designers and FCS1 for our film guys.
It really depends on where you're coming from. If you mainly do film and want to add nice effects, I might be inclined to go with FCS2. If you want to branch out more into design and pro motion graphics then I'd go with CS3.
I get the feeling you're more of a film person and want to add some nice effects and one thing I will say in favour of FCS is that Motion is completely hardware accelerated so as long as your GPU is good, you should get pretty fast turnaround times on your effects. AE, like most compositing packages is software based (although there is a hardware renderer) and that type of rendering is very slow. Typically it processes about 1 frame per second (it varies greatly of course depending on the project) but that automatically means 25-30 times slower than real-time. Hardware rendering is real-time.
Here's a review of Motion 3:
http://www.macworld.com/2007/06/revi...php?lsrc=mwrss
There seem to be some of the same issues I found with slow-downs in earlier versions. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable relying on it professionally except for simple motion graphics sequences but if you are going solo, the fast turnaround times and also the simplicity of not having to jump between so many non-integral packages might be better.
I also get the impression you won't be using FCS from your work. If you were, I'd suggest CS3 and stick with FCS1. If you don't have access to FCS1, I don't think CS3 will have anything that truly makes up for it.
The last time I tried Motion, I absolutely hated it. It was slow and very unstable even on a quad G5 with Geforce 6600 w 256MB VRam and 4GB Ram. I'm used to using quite powerful software like Shake and Motion felt like a kids toy.
Motion 3 I haven't used yet but the videos show some incredible capability so it looks like they've done a hell of a lot of work since the earlier versions. It seems they are taking parts from Shake to use in Motion too like the tracking features.
I do know however that After Effects is tried and tested through the film and motion graphics industry and it runs very well on the Intel machines. Motion is still a newcomer. Photoshop and Flash are also great products to have in your workflow.
Where I work we use CS3 for our designers and FCS1 for our film guys.
It really depends on where you're coming from. If you mainly do film and want to add nice effects, I might be inclined to go with FCS2. If you want to branch out more into design and pro motion graphics then I'd go with CS3.
I get the feeling you're more of a film person and want to add some nice effects and one thing I will say in favour of FCS is that Motion is completely hardware accelerated so as long as your GPU is good, you should get pretty fast turnaround times on your effects. AE, like most compositing packages is software based (although there is a hardware renderer) and that type of rendering is very slow. Typically it processes about 1 frame per second (it varies greatly of course depending on the project) but that automatically means 25-30 times slower than real-time. Hardware rendering is real-time.
Here's a review of Motion 3:
http://www.macworld.com/2007/06/revi...php?lsrc=mwrss
There seem to be some of the same issues I found with slow-downs in earlier versions. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable relying on it professionally except for simple motion graphics sequences but if you are going solo, the fast turnaround times and also the simplicity of not having to jump between so many non-integral packages might be better.
I also get the impression you won't be using FCS from your work. If you were, I'd suggest CS3 and stick with FCS1. If you don't have access to FCS1, I don't think CS3 will have anything that truly makes up for it.
Thanks Marvin. That's really helpful. The one thing that keeps dragging me back to CS3 is photoshop, purely from the content creation aspect. I think FCS1 and CS3 might be the way to go. Cheers for your input. Much appreciated.