Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (3)

To find out how Premiere Pro's and Final Cut Studio 2 performance (which varies according to output format) compares on the same platform, I used a Mac Pro with two 3.0-GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon X1900 graphics card driving one 23-inch Cinema display, and a Matrox MXO adapter connected to a preview monitor.

Using my standard 4-minute test project, which includes a range of effects, I performed rendering and encoded to MPEG-2. Here, Final Cut Pro beat Premiere Pro, 5:32 (min:sec) to 7:50. When I encoded a 6-minute test file to similar H.264 video-compression parameters (640-by-480 resolution, 500-Kbps, single-pass variable-bit-rate) in both programs, Premiere Pro beat Final Cut Pro, 2:57 to 10:25. To keep the numbers this close, I used Compressor's Better deinterlacing option, since Best (which is motion compensated) boosts encoding time significantly for minimal quality gain

On my last test, which transcoded a 10-minute HDV file to HD using MPEG-2 parameters and single-pass VBR encoding, Premiere Pro edged out Final Cut Pro, 32:15 to 34:25. Quality on all tests was very similar. Final Cut Pro does have a distributed encoding option, Qmaster, that can take advantage of multiple processors. Adobe Premiere Pro does not.

In similar tests using Premiere Pro on an HP xw8400 workstation with an eight-core configuration (two Quad-Core processors), the software made good use of the extra cores, particularly when producing HD-compatible MPEG-2 files. Premiere finished the 4-minute test file in 4:11, the 6-minute H.264 file in 2:15, and the 10-minute HDV file in 7:47