Premiere Back on Mac 161
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?"
Re:ppc (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Not the best but "good enough" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:ppc (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:not unless... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fans of Final Cut always tell me that I just haven't used it enough to appreciate it, but I've never found a fan of Final Cut who has given Premiere a decent try either.
The bottom line is, people like what they are used to, and for most users of one of the two, they never try the other because it is on a different platform. That might change now that they will both run on Apple.
Competition improves the breed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Switchers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Programs like Premiere and other media applications do quite a bit of this type of computation so Adobe would need to write their code using both APIs.
Re: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performa
Certainly not saying it isn't possible to do it, but they would likely need two copies of many functions and to sprinkle #ifdefs all over their code.
Re:Switchers? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:ppc (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:I hope you're kidding (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Is the current Mac OS competition for Unix and Linux based operating systems? The simple answer is no. I switched to Linux from Mac OS because with Mac OS I lost a lot of data, removable media drives crashed, and hard drives disappeared. Not to mention, the OS itself didn't have preemptive multitasking. If you asked me to use Mac OS again I rather work fast food than do it. Linux is a joy to work with. Why go back to a Yugo when you already own a Ferrari? I can now, actually run multiple programs effectively and I can even use 64 bit chips!
Oh wait, things have changed on the Mac since that time? It's Unix based? It has proper multitasking? It runs on fast chips now? Performance has improved? Imagine that!
But lets pretend that despite the fact that years have passed, the application, the OS, etc. hasn't been completely rewritten. It's the intelligent response.
A sign of rising marketshare (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not the best but "good enough" (Score:3, Insightful)
In the Mac world, the Premiere brand name may have been mortally wounded by version 4.2, which was out forever and was excruciatingly bad - the interface was awful, it had horrifying sound sync problems, etc. Most Apple premiere users dumped the Adobe product like the trash it was and moved to Final Cut as soon as it was introduced. To give you an idea of how awful Premiere was, it cost $699 and Final Cut was $999. Nobody bought the $699 program; everyone saved their pennies and paid $999 for FCP.
Usually the cheap version of anything has its defenders; not with Premiere versus Final Cut.
In the Windows world at that time there were few good or even decent choices, so Premiere, bad as it was, soldiered on until Premiere Pro. Of course this explains why video editors are heavily tilted towards Macs. The competition was so abysmal in the Windows world that a very high percentage of editors switched.
(Of course the big exception is Avid, but that's a completely different universe from Premiere/FCP. Avid has a vertical cliff face learning curve and only those who have its keystrokes etched in their fingers are going to use it.)
So now Adobe wants to be back in the game but I doubt that many FCP editors will consider returning. But they will enjoy the bundle with After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other goodies anyway, since the pro bundle is very close in price to the Pro version of AE alone.
So the bundle will sell. Whether people will use Premiere is another matter.
D