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Apple Offers Discounts to Adobe Premiere Users

Posted by pudge on from the ooo-slam dept.

JHromadka writes "Apple is responding to Adobe dropping future Premiere releases with great deals on Final Cut products. You can trade in Premiere for a free copy of FC Express, or $500 off FC Pro."

9 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Express or Pro? by twocoasttb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, I'm thinking about doing the trade-in deal, as opposed to the $500 upgrade deal. What could I do in Premiere that I couldn't do in Final Cut Express? The marketing stuff doesn't allude to anything...

    1. Re:Express or Pro? by skinfitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What could I do in Premiere that I couldn't do in Final Cut Express?

      How about "more or less anything?" Premiere is awkward to use, but once learned is an extremely powerful package. The amount of layers that you can use alone makes it more "powerful" than FCP.

      FCP is a good package - lets make no mistake about that - if you want simple video editing, then it can do it, however Premiere is a lot more flexible, if a lot more complicated, however with power comes the knowledge pre-requisite.

      You want to do extremely complicated edits, use Premiere and perhaps consider After Effects. You want pain free relatively basic editing, get FCP.

    2. Re:Express or Pro? by daviddennis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have never heard anyone defend Premiere before as anything other than awful. I tried it, briefly, and quickly realized that any other video editing program had to be loads better.

      I thought you could do all the layering you would ever want on FCP. From version 1, FCP had "segments", sort of like subroutines of video that you'd already edited. You can easily prepare and combine in any way you wanted with other segments, which is an enormously powerful feature that was only added to Premiere with the advent of Premiere Pro (this new Windows-only version).

      FCP also has extensive keyboard shortcuts that make you a lot more efficient. Again, Premiere Pro brags about this, but FCP did it first.

      Could you give an illustration on something you could do in Premiere that you couldn't do in FCP?

      I know you can do wonderful things in After Effects, although it's about as fast as a drugged slug. But Premiere? You've roused my curiosity :-).

      D

    3. Re:Express or Pro? by Gizzmonic · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if you capture an entire tape, you're looking at huge amounts of hard disk space...you get maybe 5 minutes per GB with uncompressed DV.

      Even for a user with lots of hard drive space, that limits your focus. Making a list also saves huge amounts of time.

      If you're a consumer user that's just manipulating small clips anyway, then iMovie is the way to go. I still don't think that FC Express is worth $299...

      --
      (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
  2. Ebay! by rumpledstiltskin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a pretty sweet deal when you consider that you can get cheapo versions of premiere on ebay. there weren't any restrictions on version number that I could see from the fine print. just no academic or similarly discounted versions.

  3. Worldwide availability? by Mitz+Pettel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While this page claims that the FCE and FCP offers are "available worldwide", it also says that deliveries "must be made to addresses within the 50 United States or the District of Columbia", and there's no sign of the offer on Apple's UK site. What gives?

  4. Go Apple by runenfool · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Im glad Apple did this as its exactly what I asked our rep for as soon as the Adobe announcement was made.

    Adobe has decided that not only can it not compete with a better product (its competing when its not bundled for free with the OS), but that it wants to push a much more serious rival's media software (WMP).

    FCP is a great reason to own a Mac, and offering free or inexpensive cross grades to FCP from Premiere on both platforms is exactly what Apple needs to do to stay competitive.

    The media technologies are actually the key to the Premiere/FCP battle. Keeping MPEG4 at the front of the game is extremely important to all of us who are interested in seeing open media technologiers (and who don't want another reason to be stuck on Windows). Having Adobe push Microsoft's solution (not saying you can't do anything else - but notice the prominent mention of MS technologies in their PR release for Premiere) is bad for all of us.

    My point? Apple competing hard for open media standards via products like FCP is great for those people who will never use either piece of software.

  5. Burning DVDs by ceri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Will Final Cut (preferably Express) allow me to burn existing MPEG-2s to DVD? I can export MPEG-2 files from my ReplayTV but can't seem to burn them onto my SuperDrive without first converting them to DV and then using iDVD.

    Ceri

  6. Availability in Europe; Adobe cooperation? by Mitz+Pettel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, according to Andrew Webb on MacInTouch, Apple says that

    This promotion is coming to the UK in the next 7 days. The reason for the slight delay (compared to the US one, which started yesterday) is that we have been working with Adobe to get the promo up and running in all European countries simultaneously, which is a logistical nightmare. But we're getting there.
    (emphasis mine)

    So it seems that Adobe is cooperating with Apple on this one (maybe by assuring them that Adobe customers won't be in violation of their Premiere licenses by just sending the media to Apple).