A short Q and A with Automatic Duck about their Adobe move

The Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

Auto Duck is retooling their company as its co-founder moves to Adobe

A bit of surprising news came across the tubes just the other day about one of the workhorse tool companies of post-production. That news was that Automatic Duck, and its founder and face man Wes Plate, had been scooped up by Adobe. It was quite a surprise to me as I have always seen Automatic Duck as a platform independent company. While they specifically made plugs-ins for Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro these tools made it possible to to move edits into other systems including Avid Media Composer and Pro Tools as well as Quantel. And like that, Automatic Duck was gone … at least for a little while.

It’s important to note that Automatic Duck hasn’t been exclusive to building plugs-ins for FCP and AE. A check of the Wayback Machine reminds us that there was a time when Auto Duck were making plug-ins for Autodesk Combustion and Adobe Premiere Pro. These guys have been building post-production workflow tools for quite a few years now so they know something about software translation and engineering.

It was an email on September 26 that brought the news that “Automatic Duck has partnered with Adobe Systems.” That seemed pretty straight forward but this email letter to Auto Duck customers also said that co-founder Wes Plate had “joined the Adobe Product Marketing team.” With that letter the Automatic Duck website went dormant with a note to customers and no way to purchase and/or browse Automatic Duck products. This seemed a little sudden, especially considering the new Final Cut Pro X OMF export tool that Auto Duck delivered back in June when FCPX shipped. The tool came out and it worked (before the new XML I/O of FCPX 10.0.1) but like all the other Auto Duck tools, it’s gone, at least temporarily. read more...