Final Cut vs Premiere

well i am a big supporter of final cut pro 7. if you have final cut pro x then i say use premier hands down. i personally haven't used premier enough to make a decision on whats really "better." they are very similar tho in a lot of ways so maybe learn both at the same time cuz each has a few pros and cons that the other doesn't have. so maybe look into that and see what is best for you.

I have heard premiere has a steep learning curve but I wouldnt really know

I've used both and i personally like premiere much more. It's all personal preference but I'm surprised so many people on here use final cut

thanks guys! i think im just going to experiment with both and see which i like better and go from there..

I used to be the biggest FCP 7 supporter...unfortunately it stopped about 5 months ago when FCP X came out and they announced no longer supporting or updating the actual Pro application.

Drawbacks to FCP 7, you limited to 4 GB of ram support for rendering no matter how much you have in your system.  You can't edit before you Render.  And the system is really aged honestly.  Sure don't fix what isn't broken.  Unfortunately it's fallen behind.

Premiere Pro has the future in mind with 4K support, all the same plugins, you can edit before you do a final render with pretty solid playback.  For me it has raw .r3d support.  And overall just more control over the overall project.  Plus Adobe's DVD production program is better than DVD Studio Pro.  Maybe it's just preference and there are a list more reasons as to why I don't like FCP 7 after really jumping into Premiere Pro.  Just my 2 cents.

It's your choice personally of course but take this from someone that has used FCP studio for the past 7 years if you want.  I really don't like it after using PP, I just use it every once and awhile to stay up to speed with it for work. 

what do you mean by this?

In FCP you don't get playback until you Render if it's red colored.

In PP you can edit while it's red.  You get preview before you render and it plays back as video. 

so you mean if i apply an effect to a clip in FCP, i cant view the effect untill i render the final video?

no you can still apply an effect and if the bar turns red for that clip, you can highlight it and then just render that selection so you don't have to do the entire video if you don't want. i usually render as i need to so then i can just play it back all as one later. this really only hinders your workflow if you have a super long clip that you apply weird shit to and need to render that. but i never have problems with it. Jeff has a Scarlet now though so Premiere is definitely the way to go for logistical reasons with files of that size