Adobe Premiere Pro and the evolution of the NLE

PVC by Eric Philpott

Interview with product manager Al Mooney

Al Mooney, senior product manager for Adobe Premiere Pro, has a long history in digital video editing and has played his part in the evolution of the NLE. Mooney grew up in the Southwest of England and studied music and sound recording at the University of Surrey. Starting out as a broadcast engineer, he went on to work for Digidesign (part of Avid Technology) and then Apple in the UK in sales and business development work. Mooney has been product manager of Premiere Pro since 2010.

With the launch of the 2014 versions of the Creative Cloud applications, I sat down with Al to talk about the past, present, and future of Premiere Pro and video editing in general.

How did you get into the world of film and broadcast production?

The original plan was to be an audio engineer in music. I studied audio engineering and, as part of my degree, worked a year for a German broadcaster as a sound designer. While there, it became pretty obvious that working in recording studios wasn’t for me – in part because I quite like things like daylight and eating. So when I finished my studies I went to work as a music product specialist at Digidesign. My interests evolved from there: at first I started to get excited about audio for pictures, and then pictures themselves.

You’ve been the Premiere Pro product manager since CS 5.5. What were your objectives for the application when you were overseeing that release?

It was pretty clear to me – and I don’t think I was alone in this - that we had a great engine but a pretty ugly car. I wanted to make driving Premiere Pro delightful: I wanted to make people swoon when they looked at it. read more...