When it comes to investing in video editing software, the long-drawn battle between Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro has been confusing many video editors.
Where Final Cut Pro is one of the best video editing software for Macs, Adobe’s Premiere Pro is an impressive tool for Windows.
In this article, we will uncover the major difference between both these tools and see how their features differ from each other and which one’s worth investing in.
Final Cut Pro Overview
Final Cut Pro is a video editing software developed by Apple.
It offers powerful functions such as an Object Tracker that relies on machine learning and detects faces, objects, and their movement matching them with titles and effects. With this platform, you can also adjust focus points and depth of field on clips recorded in Cinematic mode on iPhone.
Final Cut Pro is designed to work best with Apple silicon, enabling editing of huge projects with larger frame sizes, bigger frame rates, and videos with more effects at a higher speed.
It comes with advanced organizing tools, 2D and 3D title creation, an audio editor for improving audio quality, and various delivery options.
Adobe Premiere Pro Overview
Adobe Premiere Pro offers a bundle of tools to help users churn out content as easily as editing text.
Users can implement automatic transcript creation, video searching, dialogue-linking, and cutting and pasting text to edit videos at lightning speed.
The software provides unique titles, transitions, and effects for your videos, helping you beat your competition with ease. Its features aid in pumping up social media engagement through custom captions. Premiere Pro has an AI-driven Speech to Text feature that generates automatic captions.
Additionally, it boasts features for auto-reframing of videos on different social platforms.
Lastly, Premiere Pro allows the mixing of audio and music for individual calibration of soundtracks. It does this efficiently through inbuilt templates and tutorials.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: User Interface
The interface of Final Cut Pro is built with a magnetic timeline, which better enables you to edit in what appears to be a floating motion. Clips get out of the way so they don’t develop any sync issues, allowing you to simply concentrate on creating the video.
The interface is less cluttered and more intuitive for those who are used to Apple’s UI, where design features appear cleaner and simpler.
The interface of Adobe Premiere Pro is largely traditional and similar to Adobe products, particularly its features, providing greater familiarity among users already familiar with the Adobe product ecosystem.
It offers more customization through its workspace, where you are able to arrange your panels and windows oriented best towards your working style.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Workflow
Final Cut Pro’s workflow is considered more streamlined and efficient, especially for solo editors or smaller teams. It allows the editing process to move faster and be done in an intuitive fashion.
The timeline provides robust organizational tools like keyword tagging and smart collections that can speed up the sorting and finding clips process, depending on how sophisticated one wishes to make their collection of media files.
Premiere Pro’s workflow is highly customizable, making it better suited for large teams or more complicated projects.
Much like Adobe Photoshop with the Camera Raw plug-in, the major software applications within Premiere Pro seamlessly integrate with one another.
This makes things go smoother when working with graphics or special effects in After Effects and Photoshop.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Features
Final Cut Pro
- Magnetic Timeline: This allows for a more fluid editing experience as clips are automatically moved out of the way to avoid collisions and sync problems.
- Advanced Multicam Editing: Final Cut Pro offers multicam projects that can be edited with automatic syncing done based on timecode, markers, or audio waveforms.
- 360° Video Editing: It features full tools for editing immersive 360° video content.
- Motion Graphics Templates: A drag-and-drop feature library lets you customize 2D and 3D titles, effects, and transitions.
- Optimization for Apple Hardware: Final Cut Pro is optimized specifically for Apple’s hardware, like the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar and the Pro Display XDR.
Adobe Premiere Pro
- Integration with Adobe Creative Cloud: Premiere Pro seamlessly integrates with other Adobe applications, from After Effects to Photoshop, speeding up your video editing process.
- Supports a Wide Range of Formats: Premiere Pro supports natively media files of almost all types.
- Advanced Audio Editing: It gives stronger audio editing experiences with Essential sound panel integration.
- Collaboration Features: While there’s no native collaboration feature available, Premiere Pro provides useful collaborative features such as shared projects and controlled multiple open projects.
- VR Editing: With VR prevalent and at peak levels, Premiere has tools that help you work on 360° video and stereoscopic 3D.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Performance
Final Cut Pro is designed for Mac computers with Apple Silicon (M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max chips), enhancing its ability to take full advantage of the hardware.
Because of this, it’s possible that rendering and export times will be faster than those available in Premiere Pro on the same machine.
The software is also optimized to take advantage of the metal framework, further boosting performance on Macs.
Finally, because Final Cut Pro background renders allow you to edit without being slowed down by some rendering processes, you can make your edits faster.
Adobe Premiere Pro isn’t platform-specific, and it works across both Mac and Windows systems. This means the platform isn’t optimized specifically for any OS like Final Cut Pro is.
It could mean fewer processing power capabilities compared to Final Cut Pro available on the same Macs if used more heavily or extensively. That said, the software does offer strong performance on high-end Windows machines.
Additionally, Premiere Pro integrates well with other Adobe software, allowing you to streamline workflow for time savings potential.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Accessibility
Final Cut Pro is a product of Apple and is therefore only available on macOS. This means that if you’re a Windows or Linux user, you won’t be able to use Final Cut Pro.
However, being an Apple product, Final Cut Pro is designed to work seamlessly with other Apple software and hardware, including the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar and Pro Display XDR.
It also integrates well with other Apple apps, which can be a significant advantage if you’re already invested in the Apple ecosystem.
Adobe Premiere Pro is available on both Windows and macOS. This makes it more accessible to a wider range of users.
Additionally, Premiere Pro is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, which means it integrates seamlessly with other Adobe products like After Effects, Photoshop, and Audition.
This can be a major advantage if you frequently work with these other tools as part of your editing workflow.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Compatibility
Final Cut Pro supports many types of files, like
- ProRes
- HDV
- P2 MXF (DVCProHD)
- XDCAM (via plug-in)
- 2K/4K film formats
It even has support for H.264 from DSLRs. However, it does not natively support as many file formats as Adobe Premiere Pro. For instance, it doesn’t natively support image sequences or project files from other video editing software.
Adobe Premiere Pro is known for its reasonable compatibility. It supports a wide variety of formats in both hardware and software, including but certainly not limited to:
- MP4
- MOV
- MTS
- AVI
- MXF
It also supports image sequences and project files from other video editing software – a major advantage if you’re changing tools or collaborating with others who may be using other video editing software.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Customer Support
Final Cut Pro, as it’s a product of Apple, has an impeccable support team. Users have access to support through various channels, including online support documents, community message boards, and troubleshooting threads, or by getting direct support from Apple via either phone or conversation.
Generally speaking, Apple’s support system receives a good reputation for its quality and promptness. Besides official support, there also exists a large reach user base that makes use of the Final Cut Pro forums and communities.
There are already numerous online DIY sites, magazines, blogs, and YouTube channels, where users share tips, tutorials, and ways to resolve common problems faced with Final Cut Pro.
An equally active Adobe user community extends across their customer-based products like Premiere Pro, where they provide detailed help articles and guides.
Another benefit of being a Premiere Pro customer is receiving direct support services/conversations through chat as well.
In addition, Adobe has a dedicated solution forum where users can make use of problem reports and solutions widely available to them.
Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere Pro: Pricing
Final Cut Pro has a 90-day free trial, but you will have to buy it once the trial ends. It will cost you ~350 USD; that’s a lot.
Whereas, after Premiere Pro’s free trial, you can sign up for its paid monthly subscription, which will cost you anywhere between $19.99 -99.99 per month, depending on the plan you choose. So Premiere Pro is comparatively lighter to the pocket if you prefer paying monthly instead of a one-time fee.
Which One I Think Is the Best Video Editing Software?
If you ask me, there’s no one winner in this comparison. It depends on your feature priorities. So before getting one of the above software, ensure that you have your preferable set of features decided.
Both tools have more or less the same features, but where one lacks, the other thrives, and vice versa.
If you have both a Mac and a Windows setup, try both these software out and see which one suits your editing skills. But go for Final Cut Pro if you have a Mac and Premiere Pro if you have Windows.
You may also explore some top Adobe Premiere Pro Plugins to power up your editing arsenal.