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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?"
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.
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.
PPC Macs are dead. PPC processors are far from it.
They don't.
Final Cut Pro compares to Avid. After Effects is for effects, as you might guess from the name. People editing in FCP or Avid sometimes use After Effects to render some special effects before re-importing them into their editor.
As for Cinelerra, I would guess that no professional editor would have ever even heard the name, let alone have a clue about what it is. Well, even I couldn't quite figure out what it was supposed to be last time I looked at their site. Apparently also some sort of special effects rendering thing, except it cannot import from or export to your editing program, so I'm not sure what it might be used for.
A little experiment: search the Cinelerra site (which includes the documentation) for various very specific keywords which would be relevant for any professional film/video editing program:
Time code stuff:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
Edit lists stuff:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
NLE programs:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aheroinewarr
Now try the same searches on the avid.com site.
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).
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
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