I was tapped to produce a conference video again for the first time in a while last week. Much of that work had simply vanished after the ill begotten presidential addresses on corporate waste. I am glad to have the opportunity again. It has forced me to update my Adobe skills as well.
I had not used Premiere or After Effects for professional work for several years having adopted Final Cut Pro and Motion. These programs were equally effective and significantly more affordable from Apple. A few years ago Steve Jobs announced how excited he was about the new paradigm one of his video editing engineers had come up with for iMovie and they rolled out the new interface with much pomp and circumstance. I have to admit, I was grateful. It was and remains an awful, confusing cluegy, cycle sucking, bossy (I'm gonna render when I feel like it!) 'merde embulant'. As a result, I got a big bump is post production jobs. People couldn't get this thing to work so they hired a professional to do it in FCP.
I guess if you have the absolute latest, fastest, memory heavy mac straddling your keyboard it 'might' be a bit less annoying. The fact is, in the real world, especially this world, graphics professionals are already being marginalized financially. If you are paying top dollar, you are paying for the mouth of a sales person and their manager because unless you are working with the artist directly, those artists are making 20% or less then what you are paying. Personally, I find it insulting to literally pay for 'lip service'. It's a waste of money. The same money that would have bought that hot new mac to straddle the keyboard of the artists who knows how to play those keys and still would cost you less. Some people like to pay, with the company's cash, to have their ego stroked. In the long run, FCP was ultimately swallowed whole, by this ridiculous paradigm. I have had to help clients locate and purchase old used macs and kick up dusty copies of FCP Studio 7 to avoid this 'new' interface.
I don't know a single professional video editor who is actually using FCP anymore. It's truly sad. I loved my FCP, but it gone. In fact, it seems to have become a blemish on my resumé. Young professionals have no sense of history. It's not their fault, they are young. They were not there. They do not know. It is always helpful when you work with people who recognize the limits in their own scope, but that is a luxury one can not count on. The result of all this is that my Premiere and After Effects skills are back on the front burner. A bit awkward at first but I'm on the third job this summer and in spite of increased functionality and some rolling changes in the interface the Adobe products are like riding a bike. Sorry Apple, it pains me to say it but just because you give away millions of copies of iMovie doesn't mean for a second anyone is actually using it and it has corrupted the legacy that was Final Cut Pro.
