I’m usually a PC person, but recently, I bought myself a MacBook Pro because I just needed a laptop where I could just edit wherever I am. If I’m out and about, I can just take it with me and I can edit whilst I’m filming stuff that I’m doing, which massively speeds up my editing workflow.
So, I got myself a MacBook Pro.
One of the things that I was kind of hesitant about was switching from Premiere Pro to Final Cut Pro. I wanted to try Final Cut. But you know, when you’re just set in your ways and you’ve been using something for years, it’s just kind of like, hmm, I don’t know. Then I kept seeing the trial pop up for Final Cut Pro and I thought, okay, let me give it a go and then that was kind of it.
I’m not trying to hate Premiere Pro because it’s been a thing that I’ve used for years and I’ve liked it when I’ve used it. But there are just things that when it doesn’t work and it just, you’ve spent so much time doing something and then it crashes and then you lose stuff and then you have to go back again and it just, it’s too much.
The other thing is, when I got my MacBook Pro, I was editing in Premiere and when I was exporting my footage, everything looked dull and bland and I just couldn’t understand what was going on. So I started looking for this issue and then it came up with loads of different things about this gamma shift issue that Premiere has when you export something on a Mac and then you’ve got the whole QuickTime player and then it just looks dull and then most players are QuickTime, so if anyone’s looking at your footage on their laptop or their TV, then it’s just going to look dull and I just couldn’t have that.
So at that point, that is when I switched over and I thought, right, let me try this Final Cut trial. So while I’ve been using Final Cut, there are so many things that I absolutely love about it, but there are five things in particular that just make this one of the best editing software that I’ve used.
FCPX Doesn’t Crash!
So remember how I was saying that Premiere crashes all the time and it will freeze and then you’ll lose stuff and it will try to recover the file but it doesn’t always and then it just completely ruins your flow and yeah, you do end up losing work. I have not had this with Final Cut whatsoever. It’s been absolutely incredible and if it does, for whatever reason, crash, which I think it’s happened like once and I think that was because my laptop… it was going to close. But it had saved everything before it closed. So when I reopened it, everything was fine—nothing was broken. It was great. So that in itself is just such a massive plus, not having something that’s constantly crashing which is going to lose your work.
FCPX Constantly Saves Everything in the Background
With Premiere, I used to have so many files—versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12—because I would literally be saving my work every five minutes.
After all the crashes and the breakdowns, it was like, I’m not losing any more work but Final Cut is constantly saving in the background and it’s constantly backing up the footage and the timeline and everything so it’s all in this library and everything’s enclosed in this library and it’s just completely backed up constantly. Every time you do something, it saves it so that is just a massive plus because there are certain situations where you’re just completely, you’re so into working and you forget to save something and then, yeah, Premiere would crash and that was it so that is just a massive lifesaver in itself.
The Magnetic Timeline of FCPX
The next thing I thought was actually quite strange when I first used it because Premiere doesn’t have this is the magnetic timeline… and when I first started using this, I was pulling my hair out because it was like, things were moving and I didn’t want them to move and then I’d cut something and then something would jump somewhere else and it was just, it was driving me insane and so I actually spent some time then and I thought, okay, let me figure out how to actually use this properly and since actually learning how to use it properly, it has sped up my workflow so much.
The magnetic timeline is one of the best things I’ve ever had in a piece of editing software because it’s just brilliant, it just makes things so much quicker when you’re trying to chop from b-roll to talking headpieces or just anything, it just makes it so much easier and quicker when you’re just doing everything and I absolutely love it.
Easy J-cuts and L-cuts
I guess this next point is kind of part of the magnetic timeline because I absolutely love doing J-cuts and L-cuts in my videos and if you know what they are, then you probably see them quite a lot but I just feel they’re a nice transition between two things where you’ll be talking about something or showing something and then if you don’t quite have the b-roll to go over the top, instead of just having a jump cut, you can put a J-cut or an L-cut or if you’re moving from one scene to another, you can use a J-cut or an L-cut to just kind of blend the two scenes and so the magnetic timeline is absolutely perfect for this because you don’t have to cut things and then try and move the, like the footage and stuff, it’s just, it’s, yeah, I love it.
I think you can see how much I love Final Cut right now. So they are my main reasons for absolutely loving Final Cut and I keep thinking, do I, am I going to go back to Premiere, and honestly, no.
The only reason that I would go back to Premiere is because my PC is a PC, I can’t get Final Cut on my PC, my Windows PC so I will use Premiere on there when I need to but otherwise I’ll just use Final Cut all the way and as soon as I replace my PC with a Mac Studio or something then it’s just going to be Final Cut because it just works and that’s what I want.
So if you’ve been thinking about making the switch between Premiere and Final Cut, hopefully, this gives you some insight into whether it’s worth it. Just try the trial version and see how it works for you. I hope this article was useful; if it was, please share this article. Thanks.
