For the last month my flatmate has been pulling his hair out trying to make a showreel DVD. He’s been working in Encore CS3 on XP and has come across no end off issues, from random interactions and lack of help to unhandled C++ errors that crash the whole system. Even after contacting Adobe support there seems to be issues that no-one has heard of or has fixes for.
Today he took is project to a friend using DVD Studio Pro on OSX and got done in 3 hours what’s taken him weeks in Encore. Everyone he speaks to seems to use Final Cut Pro, and he’s a hairs breadth away from jacking it all in and buying all new Apple hardware and software simply so he doesn’t have to use Encore any more.
My argument many times has been ‘user error’ (at least to some degree), he only uses the software to do a new DVD once a year and I find it hard to believe that one of the premier software packages from Adobe simply doesn’t work? But am I right, is he just doing something wrong, or is FCP really that much better?
This is an honest question, don’t want to start flamewars just get some opinions from people in the know.
Cheers
It’s pretty bad. Although your case is somewhat extreme. Is it an *ahem* official disc image?
My old flatmate was staunchley anti-mac the whole time we were at college, we both were in fact, but it’s precisely this problem that’s sent him over the edge to at least getting a hackintosh! (That and Vista).
I used to use Adobe Premier 5, which was OK.. ish.. though it used to crash randomly so it was ctrl-s every other keystroke. This was on 98SE mind
Then I got some pro software and found it too complicated – great for a prof editiing studio maybe, but not for home use really.
Then came Vista, and MovieMaker – too basic, though I did manage an edited home video of the kids doing their Xmas show which worked out OK.
Now, during all of this, my friend Chris (completely computer illiterate, in the beginning – a guitarist) had been quietly upping his MAC involvement, from iMac to workstation to dual-core. Last year he made an entire 1-hour travel DVD which has now been published… for which he performed all the music which was recorded in Logic on the same machine. Without a hair out of place.
My conclusion? Windows is fine for editing text (compiling, maybe even rendering). Not bad for photoshop, even, these days. You want to do something properly “creative” WITHOUT tearing your hair out/losing all your work/giving up/spending months on it? Get a mac, buddy. And, I don’t even like them that much