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Premiere Back on Mac
woof69 writes "After dropping OS X support for Premiere some time in 2003, Adobe is bringing it back in the new
Adobe Production Studio. The new software includes After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, and Soundbooth, and will be available for Apple's Intel-based computers in mid-2007; an updated version of the Windows suite will ship at the same time.
Does Final Cut have a fight on its hands?"
It's a little surprising they went through the effort, but there will be some who will use Premiere either because a) that's what they know, b) they're primarily designers who will have it with the bundle and will see it as a "good enough" alternative to paying $1000 for Final Cut Pro, or c) they will use it as a supplement to After Effects. The latter is actually a pretty strong selling point for some, as After Effects is still a very viable app (though a true bitch to learn) and has a strong professional following and Premiere naturally integrates with it much better than FCP.
Final Cut's competition isn't really Premiere at this point anyway, it's Avid. Most editors use one or the other depending on their training and place of employment (FCP tends to be for the self trained, small production houses etc. though that is changing, Avid for major houses and television/movie productions as it has been the standard for over a decade and many if not most pro editors- particularly those who learned to edit *gasp* film- prefer to work with it)
Having worked with all three-- Premiere, FCP and Avid-- I can safely say that Premiere is the weakest of the three but is more than "good enough" if you're not cutting The Lord of The Rings. As I said it may get use just because the owner purchased the suite for Photoshop and hey, it's there.
Yes, and Framemaker next, please.
Maybe Adobe's figuring out that the Mac is still a market to be reckoned with...or maybe someone at the VP level grabbed the Premiere product manager and showed him that all his Windows customers were buying Macs to run Final Cut Pro. There are a lot of Dual-G5 owners out here who love FCP, but want Apple to have real compettion - and we're not above trying new tools and adopting them if they are better.
Hopefully Apple comes out with a decent document authoring tool (not layout; they're different) like Pages on 'roids. Given Frame's anemic sales and upgrade business, maybe they can steal another market and prod Adobe into becoming competitive again.
Final Cut Pro is the best thing to have happened to Premiere, at least as far as Windows users are concerned.
The last version of Premiere on the Mac (6.5) was a clunky just-good-enough app that contrary to popular belief was not pushed from the Mac market by Final Cut Pro.
It was Final Cut Express "killed" Premiere - Premiere itself was never competition for Final Cut Pro as Avid systems were it's target. Final Cut Express (FCE) came in at $300 and did just about everything that Premiere did for $700, and for it's target market it mostly did it better and continued to get better.
Adobe went back to the labs, licked their wounds, rolled up their sleeves and Premiere Pro was born. Windows users benefited from finally having a serious, but affordable video editing suite, but by this time the Mac market and in many ways by proxy the Pro video market was solidly split between Final Cut Pro and Avid's solutions.
Competition is a great thing for customers and just as all pro video editors benefitted from Avid's wake up call from Apple (Avid systems are no longer so expensive that you have to lease them and Avid finally took notice of these gizmos called laptops), Final Cut users will benefit from Apple's increased need to improve the product to compete with Adobe's return.
Not from FCP. Maybe from FCPE or iMovie. It'll be easy for Adobe to inject the app back into the Mac world - many people use Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects with all kinds of video work.
The fact that it's not a UB is a big setback - just about everyone I know who does video on a Mac is still on PPC. Why? Because all the coder and sysadmin kiddies with the macbooks make about two to three times the cash that we do.
That and there's a huge variety of workflow software that's still either PPC or has yet to be updated to UBs.
Yes, and Framemaker next, please.
As far as I know Framemaker was not cancelled for the Mac, Linux, and Solaris because those platforms were not profitable. It was cancelled because Adobe suffered (suffers?) from a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome. You'll notice even the PC version is nearly mothballed with few improvements as it just barely keeps up with some of the new technologies on the market. As of a few years ago I was told that Adobe dearly wanted to kill it off, but users were unwilling to switch to their replacements. Of course their replacements were simply pulling a few of the features into InDesign and assuming that would make everyone want to switch. So they didn't want Framemaker, just the customers of Framemaker and they were unable to deliver something else acceptable.
In my mind the Premier re-release was simply because their is such a demand in video editing for Mac compatibility and they were losing sales left and right not just to people who wanted to use a mac, but to people who worked somewhere where they needed the option to use either. What holds more hope for Framemaker is the merger with Macromedia that might help cure the NIH syndrome Adobe has always had, which in turn could save it on both platforms. Given all the work integrating both product lines, however, I doubt this will be a priority unless they get some real competition.
Hopefully Apple comes out with a decent document authoring tool (not layout; they're different) like Pages on 'roids.
This might help, but Apple is in the business of selling Macs, more than anything else. They are unlikely to make such a program cross-platform and as such it would miss a big chunk of the target market and probably not really take off. I think someone like Microsoft could actually do more damage in a hurry and restore competition, but we all know they would immediately try to tie it to other products and undermine that competition. So I'm not really optimistic. This might actually be a job for someone starting with TeX and building an open source, cross platform tool that they intend to use internally (IBM I'm looking at you).