I visited the Adobe Roadshow when Premiere Pro CS5 was announced, and I must say I was impressed. After half a decade of intermediate formats, transcoding and all that, the mercury playback engine was miles ahead of FCP7 in terms of uninterrupted workflow.

At the time, DSLR video was about to become a major player, and Final Cut Pro wasn’t doing anything about it. Being able to edit in any codec was a godsend for editors more than ever mixing formats. As we all know by now, the background rendering version bumped 64bit of Final Cut Pro never arrived. Instead came a shitstorm of epic proportions following the release of what some called the iMovie Pro – the FCPX.

The Compressed Footage Editing Challenge

I still haven’t familiarized myself too much with FCPX, but I recently had a small, interesting experience that struck me; Working on a documentary, I was receiving .H264 preview files from my editor. Wanting to test some cuts, I imported the clip into FCPX and told it to not transcode or optimize the file. What happened was just what I was expecting from a modern NLE: hazzle free, real time playback of a compressed 720i@H264 file. No intermediate file, no transcoding, no nothing. It just worked. Great!

But – while FCPX now supports XML, it doesn’t support FCP7 readable XML, so all my rough cuts would have to be redone manually by my editor, requiring a lot of time we didn’t have. This didn’t seem like a smart idea, so I fired up a trial of CS5.

[EDIT: I have later learned that there are multiple plugins avaliable for this process, like Xto7 and 7toX]

Adobe Premiere CS5

Based on the highly advertised mercury playback engine, I was completely sure the proess would be as smooth as in FCPX. I was proven wrong. Trying the same procedure with Premiere Pro CS5 was … crappy. Never mind the heavily touted Breakthrough performance with mercury playback engine; neither my old MacPro, nor my 2011 MacBook Air seemed to cope with the same file. First it needed to conform the video (a process that took a good ten minutes and somehow had to be repeated every 30 minutes or so. But the playback still was terrible. Giga crunchy blocks was appearing between all the GOPs, making the editing session unbearable. In addition, video was breaking up, and I was losing audio sync.

Since I’m missing the FCP XML support from FCPX, and given all the free advertising AVID and Premiere seemingly did get from the killing of FCP7, I thought the new version of Premiere, CS6 would have taken the advantage of fixing this this, so I downloaded it. How would it cope?

Adobe Premiere CS6

Trying CS6 was a bit better, the blocks were gone, but playback was only sporadic; It was impossible to switch between apps without being prompted with a black screen or the media pending window for 20-40 seconds before it let me edit again, and I got the exact same behavior from both my Macs.

So what am I saying really?

Even if they have had two years of perfecting their mercury playback engine, working with Adobe isn’t a breeze either. Compressed H264 might have or not have too much in common with native DSLR footage, but while this might not be anything but a biased test, it is far from insignificant, far from uncommon, and contains a factor I would greatly appreciate from a modern NLE.

In short, Adobe have been beat by a contender that was a laughing stock of the professional editing business only months ago…

Does that qualify for reevaluating FCPX? Not as a single cause, but based on these unscientific tests, it might show proof that Apple actually have done a very deep, and perhaps even superior job in their playback engine, and they aren’t even evangelizing about it. I guess I’m only saying although it still has a long way to go, I have begun taking FCPX seriously.