CS5 Plays Nice with Others

Using Premiere Pro CS5 in a cross-platform workflow with Final Cut Studio.

Among post-production NLE’s there has been an increasing platform-specific polarisation. Final Cut Pro is of course only available on the Mac. Edius and Sony Vegas are PC/Windows-only. Avid has long been cross-platform but its only been in very recent times that Mac and PC versions were unified; and even now require specific qualified hardware configurations. It’s here that Adobe Premiere Pro has stood out since CS2 as the a truly equilateral cross-platform and hardware independent editing system.

More than just the ability to have Premiere Pro installed on a Mac or PC system and move project files from one to the other, Adobe’s approach with Premiere’s cross-platform attitude has increasingly been toward open formats to move projects between applications as well as operating systems; even so far as open compatibility with other NLE’s.

This open, ‘Plays nice with others’, approach began in earnest with CS4 and the ability for Premiere to open Final Cut Pro XML project files. This allowed for post-production workflows that originated in FCP to be moved into an Adobe pipeline (on either PC or Mac) using Premiere as the gateway facilitating tight integration with other CS apps - After Effects, Encore, Soundbooth and Photoshop.

With CS5 Adobe have added the missing companion piece to this openness, the ability to not only import FCP XML files but also export them from Premiere. This opens up the possibility of not just working from Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro CS5 but also back the other way as well.

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This is an extract from an article on CS5 and cross-platform workflows I wrote for AusCamOnline. You can read the rest of the article here.