Premiere is slow and getting slower. Should I switch to Final Cut?!

[mineabis]

I experienced it first hand and now I'm seeing many posts and articles about it. Premiere is slow and getting slower with each new version. This sucks immensely. What can I do, other than considering swtiching to Final Cut? Do I wait until Adobe gets their sh*t together? This is painful and costing a lot of time on my end. HELP!

[Ann Bens]

FAQ: What information should I provide when asking a question

[MyerPj]

I think it's getting faster. The newest feature they added, hardware encoding with nVidia cards cut my projects main sequence rendering time from 6:08 to 3:38. Maybe you need a fresh OS install on your machine if it's really getting slower. My windows installs typically last 2-3 years, then Windows is crying out for a reinstall. I usually just get a new SSD and archive to current one. With just this one post over the years, I can't think you'll be missed here, but feel free to hang out and give some of your advice and expertise to other users.

[ah_photo]

I think there is a lot of subjectivity on this matter. A lot of it depends on your machine specs, the codec of your footage, what you're doing in your edit, etc. (What are you working with?) Personally, I haven't noticed any performance issues. In fact, from personal experience I've seen Premiere gotten better optimized and more stable with each release starting from 2019 (minus the bump that was 14.0's initial launch).

That said if you aren't experincing the same, there are some common steps you can take to try to address the issue. Check out this resource: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/troubleshoot_playback_performance.html

The one thing I'll say on Final Cut having cut for a long time on FCP7 and very briefly on FCPX is, it is incredibly optimized, but this is in part due to Apple's weird ecosystem control over it. Apple releases Macs with CPUs with high core counts but slower core speeds, which isn't really typical and many programs aren't optimized for. As a result, you wind up spending a lot of money on a machine that is optimized for only one specific ecosystem that Apple has created. I guess that is very much the Apple way though.

I primarily switched to Premiere from FCP though because I strongly disagree with the forced spine editing approach. To me, I feel like the program has a better sense of my clip connections than myself as an editor, and to me that's a deal-breaker. As an editor I want to be in control of the story and be able to visually understand my timeline. FCPX takes that away in the name of keeping things organized for you, which just isn't my cup of tea. But hey, to each their own.

[Meg The Dog]

The latest iteration of Premiere is running briskly on my 2019 iMac, OS 10.15.5.

I switch back and forth between Premiere and FCP-X and find the actual heavy lifting part of each application runs fairly equally in speed.

Now is a good time to test the waters with FCP-X as Apple has opened up the free trial offer from 30 days to 90 days. Take it for a test spin and see what you think:

https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/trial/ 

I highly recommend the Ripple Training for FCP-X, worth every cent and more:

https://www.rippletraining.com/product-category/final-cut-pro-tutorials/ 

MtD