Adobe Get Nearer To A Bigger Slice Of The Apple

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There were two elements to modern production that were noted by their relative absence at IBC 2012, they were 3D and Final Cut Pro. Yes there were 3D products and yes there was a Supermeet and Apple were there but both were definitely out of the spotlight during the show. For Adobe Apple’s slide in to the shadows caps what could be for their video product Premiere Pro, a game changing cycle of updates. Ever since they introduced the Mercury Playback Engine in their v5 release their stock has risen meteorically. Their Product Manager Al Mooney reviewed the last couple of years in Premiere Pro’s life, “It’s been extraordinary and I really think it has exceeded our expectations, I think we’ve known for some time that we’re building a really solid, reliable, high performing professional NLE. Last year tens of thousands of switched to Premiere Pro as their primary NLE. On the Mac platform we have seen 40-45% annual growth and 20% growth across the two platforms.”

To qualify those claims of thousands of switchers is difficult in the age of the bundle, for many editors the prized software used to be After Effects and Photoshop, if you bought either bundle then Premiere Pro came along with it. It’s only now in the age of their subscription based Creative Cloud that Adobe can measure use by number of downloads actioned. But Al is honest enough to admit that their CS5 Premiere Pro offering wasn’t the best editing interface.

“From CS5 we re-built the inside, ripped the engine out and put a new engine in, the Mercury engine, that 64-bit GPU optimised which gave us the ability to playback rich, complex sequences all with real time effects with high resolution media. What perhaps we didn’t think too much about in CS5 was the experience of editing, how it feels to sit down and cut with something for a 12 hour period. CS6 gave us the opportunity to think about the experience so we completely re-designed the user interface, CS5’s interface perhaps wasn’t so conducive to editing, the UI was quite cluttered but CS6 is a much better experience.” read more...