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?"
Cinelerra (Score:3, Interesting)
good luck! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Final cut threatened? Not a chance. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ppc (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ppc (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:ppc (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Competition improves the breed (Score:2, Interesting)
Final Cut Pro is the best thing to have happened to Premiere, at least as far as Windows users are concerned.
As a Windows user I'd say Vegas Video was the best thing to happen to Premiere, and FCP for that matter. We already had a serious but affordable video editing suite (with spectacular sound editing as well.) I hated the old Premiere, like so many others, but the new one looks quite good.
adobe linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why this is important news - education market! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:A sign of rising marketshare (Score:3, Interesting)
If I recall correctly, when Soundbooth appeared (along with the accompanying uproar about it being Intel-only) it was revealed that Adobe had either licensed or purchased outright audio technology written, from the ground up, for x86 processors. I imagine they realized this, w/regard to Soundbooth (note: the numbers are purely for an example, they aren't meant to be real-world):
- It would cost us 0 dollars to not develop a Mac version of Soundbooth, and we would make 0 dollars by not doing so (heh, this is obvious - I just thought this sentence was funny.)
- It would cost us 10 million dollars (and lots of time) to make a completely, from-the-ground-up Universal version of Sound Booth, porting the library (if this is even possible) and we'd make 5 million dollars on sales.
- It would cost us 250 thousand dollars (2 programmers for nearly a year, or something) of time to create an Intel-only version of the software, and we'd make 2 million dollars on sales.
Seems to make sense to me. I'd imagine Premiere is similar (although even greater scale, since it's more popular.) Also, consider that they wouldn't have keep both PPC and x86 versions in parity, as they release upgrades, etc...Although I doubt I'll ever use Premiere on an Intel Mac, I'm excited because Premiere is an application that frequently comes up in lists of software that don't exist on the Mac (in spite of the superiority of Final Cut Express/Pro).