Your on-set digital workflow can vary wildly depending on your camera, budget, and schedule with each variable uniquely affecting the others. But, is there a flexible, multi-purpose software package that can truly cover all the bases, and at a better price than all the rest? Wolfcrow has sought to answer this question in a recent, very detailed, post. Click through for a few more details, and to see if you agree with its findings. Could Premiere & Adobe CC have the overall best value?

Wolfcrow writer Sareesh Sudhakaran compiles a chart of info about programs spanning the general-purpose NLE zone, across dedicated media management, all the way to specialized graders, including: Adobe Premiere CC, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Davinci Resolve, Red Giant Bulletproof, Redcine-X, Sony Vegas -- among several other programs I've never even heard of. The goal is to determine the usefulness of each in the various facets of on-set media management. Thanks to Wolfcrow for the exhaustive chart below (click to enlarge.)


Wolfcrow-table

Says Sareesh by his own conclusion:

As far as I’m concerned, Adobe Premiere Pro CC is probably the only software that I feel truly comfortable with. It can do everything:

  • Ingest any kind of file natively.
  • Logging.
  • Transcoding via Adobe Media Encoder.
  • Audio syncing, editing and conforming.
  • Color correction.
  • Metadata support.
  • Editing!
  • All this can be done on a laptop, on both Mac and PC.
  • Export to anything.
  • Round-trip with anything.

There are two things it can’t do:

  • Checksum verification – which Prelude does, and it comes free with Premiere Pro when you purchase the entire CC suite.
  • Digital Asset Management – which Bridge does, and it comes free with Premiere Pro CC.

It can do everything. All this is for $49.99 per month. That’s unbelievable. If a project ran for 60 shooting days, and I needed Adobe CC for five months total, I’d still only spend $250. Why on earth do I need any other software? Adobe Premiere Pro CC wins my vote for the best on-set ingest, logging, dailies, grading and backup software.

Now, it's definitely worth reading the entire post, as there is much more information to be sifted through. Your mileage may vary significantly -- the chart is just a start in the right direction. These findings are Sareesh's, and as always, specific applications may demand better-suited software. That said, metadata support and poly-lingual round-tripping basically mean you can incorporate any other tool you need into your Adobe CC workflow -- and, if the show can't afford other software, you can still pull together something more-than-solid with the tools confined to CC.

I also think Sareesh's example raises a possible defense of the subscription-only Adobe Creative Cloud: it can be treated like a 'rental' on a show-by-show-basis, so you don't have to own it indefinitely to use it. Here's a hypothetical scenario. Let's say a DIT owns and rents out gear for income additional to their standard rate, but doesn't pay for CC regularly. The show hiring that DIT, on the other hand, requires a fully-Adobe workflow. Thanks to the monthly subscription, that DIT could still rent out their own package -- merely using Adobe CC for the duration necessary -- instead of having to sub-rent a whole new rig just for the right software suite, which would lose that DIT their potential extra pay.

One again, be sure to check out the full post over at Wolfcrow, and give some props to Sareesh if you found his info-wrangling helpful!

What do you guys think of the findings? Among these apps, is Premiere, along with its cousins, the best multi-purpose value? If you disagree, what are your points of contention?

Link: A Comparison of 15 On-set Ingest, Logging, Dailies, Grading and Backup Software -- Wolfcrow