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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?"
How does After Effects and Final Cut Pro compare to Cinelerra?
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
im good friends with the son of a major hollywood editor, and she has talked about the different systems she uses. final cut (she doesn't use it) is good at what it does, and its deeply embedded in the editing community. I've used premiere for a while (pc user), and it isn't amazing. i doubt this is a threat in the least.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
I can't imagine that too many people would switch to this from Final Cut Pro.
And for those wondering, this will NOT be a Universal Binary. It has been built from scratch and will only run on Intel-based Macs.
Adobe's press release.
They've said it's Intel only. Given that by the time it's out (late 2007 at the earliest) anyone that's serious about video editing will have likely moved to the Intel Macs it's not an issue. And if you're just doing it for kicks, then iMovie or your exisitng version of Final Cut isn't going to stop working.
Eventually even Apple will stop releasing Universal Binaries of their software, probably when they do major rewrites like Adobe is doing. Isn't the new rewrite of Shake Intel only?
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.
The simple answer is no. I bought my Mac specifically for Final Cut because Premiere was such a miserable editor. I cut a feature on Premiere and easily lost 1/3 of my time to crashes. I haven't used the latest versions but the one I used, 5.5, was lightyears behind Final Cut Pro. If you asked me to cut another film on Premiere I'd rather work fast food than do it. Final Cut is a joy to work with. They are porting Premiere back to Mac because they are loosing ground to Final Cut but what they don't understand is it isn't the Mac OS people are after but Final Cut itself. Don't even bother porting it because editors that have switched are lost forever. Better to make it more stable and add features. Anyone one on Final Cut isn't likely to switch. Why go back to a Yugo when you already own a Ferrari. I'm sure there are Premiere fans that will boast of it's stability. If you're happy have fun. Personally I'm thrilled with Final Cut and would never use Premiere for any reason. It made my life a living hell so if they are loosing customers it's their own fault for putting out such a lousy editor.
Final Cut Studio has a total lock on the video editing software market south of $10k.
Premiere disappeared from the Mac because it couldn't compete. Speaking as an independent filmmaker, I can't even imagine what Adobe could do to woo me back over.
There is no chance Premiere will take the market from Final Cut. The installed user-base of Mac video editors all use Final Cut. They're not going to take the time and expense to switch to Premier, when Adobe could decide to pull the upgrade plug at any minute. The only possible result is that Windows-based Premiere users might switch to a Mac. This is only good news for Apple.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
I must know a completely different type of student to you. The students I know all get the "extra discounted" version available from all good P2P networks. When I was involved in student TV we made sure our copy was legal, but outside of that I don't know anyone at uni who paid for video editing software
PPC Macs are dead. PPC processors are far from it.
Dunno. I'm a FrameMaker fan (have been using it for 10 years now), but we're currently seeing many documentation groups moving away from FrameMaker and towards applications that have better options for document management.
When your documentation becomes very complex (e.g. using one set of documents to describe dozens of similar machines), you'll run into limitations in Frame. It'll continue to work, but the author will be too likely to lose track of which configurations a given chunk of text is used for, increasing the number of user errors.
AuthorIT is one popular option for replacing Frame. As a text editor it's not great, but it stores all its information in a database, and scales to complex documentation better than Frame. We're still using Frame to post-process AuthorIT output, though. AuthorIT's default output process uses MS Word. It does a good job of skirting Word's long-document limitations, but Word page layout is still hopeless.
Adobe's FM support has been lacklustre for the past several years. We've seen few new features, and several longstanding complaints [1] remain unaddressed. I've heard rumors that this is because the FrameMaker core code is such spaghetti that Adobe's programmers won't touch it.
1: e.g. limitations in the UI, such as non-resizable dialog boxes, which obscure most of the information contained in them
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).
Maybe they figured out that their low-level assembly code, already tailored to the Intel processor, could be married to their already existing OSX front-end code, thus making bringing it over to OSX relatively easy to do.
As for competition? Hardly. Premiere is already a mediocre program on Windows. I doubt it's going to suddenly get better just because it runs on OSX.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
This is just one indicator of how fast the Mac marketshare is rising - Adobe walked out on OS X in a huff because they didn't like FCP, now they are forced to return by the reality of a rising percentage of video editing switching to the Mac.
Interesting they went Intel only though, the only real gain I can see is simplification of testing - but they are missing out on a lot of people that still use G5's. Then again, perhaps Adobe sees a larger mass migration to Intel macs when CS3 is released for real.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm still wondering why adobe doesnt make it's own linux system to run it's products. Adobe products are a big reason why people by the computers they do, weither it be a pc or a mac. Adobe is constantly competing with microsoft and apple in the software componets, even more so with microsofts version of pdf. So why doesnt adobe just come out and compete with apple and microsoft completely? Take ubuntu, put all the adobe software on it. and make it for ppc and x86? That would be a killer combo in the creative feild. You could even have trial live cds jsut to test it out. Get rid of all the window's problems, step outside of some of the mac funkieness and bring people to unix in a new creative way. Just an idea.
The consequences have been enormous - dumps like AII "train" people to use software that "the industry" uses, and the industry uses that software because that's what they learned in school, and they learned it in school because back in the early 1990s, Adobe (and Apple) did one helluva job embedding themselves in every art and design school they could find.
Macromedia tried to do the same thing, but they didn't have the range of products: they had an image editor for a while, xRes, but it was such a buggy piece of shite, and Macromedia had done such a crap job of getting into schools, that MM decided the thing to do was to switch enemies. Adobe used to be their hated target - they saw the Internet as the next big thing and dumped their graphics orientation for the Web. With a proper panoply of tools (Dreamweaver, Flash) they got their web software into schools, and ceded the graphics market to Adobe.
Fundamentally, people use what they know, and what they know is what they learn, and that's why Quark Xpress, possibly one of the single most over-rated pieces of software EVER, still has a deep hold in the printing industry. Quark 2 was WAY better than Pagemaker aka, RAGEmaker, and Quark 3 completely blew Pagemaker out of the water. Here is where Adobe's Education strategy started to pay off... Pagemaker was a dud, and the first rev of InDesign was putrid. However, they quickly fixed InDesign, and it is now an extremely competitive product to Quark. Combined with Quark's dramatic expense for minor upgrades, InDesign is now making massive inroads into Quark turf - and the kids coming out of design "schools" have experience using it and know it as a decent product. They use what they know...
Now: this brings us to Premiere...
Adobe and Apple were on the skids when Apple cooked up FCP and iMovie. There was zero incentive for Adobe to continue developing Premiere o nthe Mac, and they stopped doing so. That, at the time, Premiere was a buggy piece of shit was not that much of an issue - the Top End was AVID at $150k for a decent set up, and then there was the rest of us... FCP (originally developed by Macromedia and sold to Apple when MM changed their focus to the Web) came in and sawed AVID off at the knees. The lead programmer for FCP was the guy who had developed Premiere for Adobe - Randy Ubillos. With massive infusions of cash from Apple (Jobs didn't care - he saw FCP as a way to sell hardware...) So, Adobe saw this all as one big Bitch Slap. Adobe's response? The Education Angle... people will use what they know, and what they know is what they learn in school...
If Apple was going to eat Premiere's lunch, then Adobe was going to de-emphasise the Apple platform, and crush FCP from without. How? After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator on the Mac is OK - Adobe defeated MM there. But Premiere ? Windows. Encore? Windows. Soundbooth? Just a repackaging of CoolEdit Pro - Windows only. And sell ALL of that software to Art Schools at a cut rate price...
Translation: an end run around Apple - a reverse Bitch Slap.
Problem: It didn't really work. In the Windows World, AVID hadn't surrendered. They used their Cash Cow (Digidesign) to help drag their ailing video editing systems along until they could get a new strategy going. AVID cooked up a pile of new software, all of it superior to Premiere et al. Cost competitive? No, but the UI was extremely similar from the low end to the high end, and with increased integration from AVID into ProTools, there was no way that Adobe could possibly compete with AVID. AVID provided an entry -> pro environment, and was deeply embedded in the industry - recording studios use ProTools, and Hollywoo
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.