I don't think it's an understatement to call Randy Ubillos the founding father of desk top video. While Avid, Media 100 and others came first, it was Adobe Premiere and Final Cut that brought computer based video editing to the masses. Alex interviewed Randy last summer at the Bay Area SuperMeetUp in San Jose. Here is the interview:
Alex4d by Alex Gollner
In April 2015 Randy Ubillos retired from Apple after many years developing video and photo applications such as Final Cut Pro and Aperture. In the 90s he wrote Adobe Premiere 1.0. He started his Mac career working at SuperMac Technologies, a Mac peripheral maker.
Alex Gollner: Let’s start at the very beginning… The program that became Premiere…
Randy Ubillos: …originally known as ReelTime.
…was actually demo software. Tell us about that
I was working for SuperMac and they were working on something called DigitalFilm - one of the very first digital video recording cards. It did quarter frame standard definition - they were pushing the limits of the JPEG chips that were available at the time and we needed some software to try it out. In about 10 weeks I put together a demo and we’d bring in people and show them editing on a computer and it was going over pretty well. The marketing department had just gotten out of software at SuperMac and they weren't sure what to do with it and so as it got close to shipping the card in late 1991 my software was sold to Adobe and they released it as Premiere 1.0.
So they sold the software and didn’t involve you?
Adobe were specifically prohibited from offering me a job, because SuperMac didn’t want to lose me, so I could ask Adobe but I had to specifically do that. I went to lunch with Tim Myers and Eric Zocher from Adobe and we sat down at lunch, there was small talk and eventually they said “So…” and I said “OK. I would like to inquire about a job at Adobe.” There were two of them so they could later corroborate the story and said “That works,” and we started talking about it. read more...
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