Kent Rich of Granite River Studios is an independent video producer and a friend who is very much from the Do It Yourself school of video. He has grown from transferring home movies to now producing broadcast commercials, web marketing videos and non-profit promotion and development pieces.
He hires contractors when he needs them, but prefers to do most tasks himself. He loves this stuff, and I think he gets great personal satisfaction from knowing he did it all.
Kent has both Adobe Premier and Apple Final Cut Pro. He prefers FCP these days but uses Premier to solve certain problems.
I know FCP well enough to have been certified by Apple to train others for the last four years. We talk about the times when he chooses to switch tools – most often both tools do the job equally well, but differently.
OR
…WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU
Avid's Media Composer 5, which will be released this week looks like a winner – Avid users are happy and a little proud. I'm considering adding an Avid system here mainly for the high quality of the "mix and match" feature. Other stuff like Paint, Animatte and ScriptSync will be big bonuses that come along for the ride.
STILL THE MOST EXPENSIVE, BUT LESS SO
STILL THE MOST FULL FEATURED, AND MORE SO
Choose tools for jobs. A chainsaw and a Ginsu Knife are both exceptionally good at cutting. But the chainsaw is a poor choice for chopping vegetables and you will look silly and slow limbing a tree with a Ginsu.