COW: Adobe Systems offers path for FCPX editors to switch

Creative Cow by Debra Kaufman

As disgruntled Apple Final Cut Pro users search out options for professional video editing, Adobe Systems has been a major beneficiary of the big switch since FCPX hit the market. "We have had a 22 percent year-over-year growth in Adobe professional video sales, says Jim Guerard, Adobe Systems Vice President and General Manager of Professional Video and Audio." "We've seen a growth from fewer than 1 million seats worldwide in 2006 to 2.3 million in 2010." Other Adobe statistics spell-out the momentum: 45 percent growth on Mac and a 30 percent increase in unit sales from CS4 to CS5.

Just as Avid has made a play to draw in former Final Cut Pro editors [Read about Avid's Event promising commitment to professionals - Editor's note], Adobe just finished touring the U.S. in the late spring/early summer to debut its upgrade program, open to any video professional who purchased a version of Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer and wanted to switch to Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Premiere Pro CS5.5. For more information on the details of the switching program, click here.

"We drew several hundred people at each event, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York," says Guerard. "We did the event with our partners NVIDIA, Canon and others, and showed people how we worked with Apple's Thunderbolt. Since we were already having a lot of customers switching from FCP to Premiere before FCPX, it didn't slow down. We're going like a rocket."

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 appeals to editors for raw speed and performance, says Guerard. "We re-architected Premiere for our Mercury Playback Engine in August 2010, with a native 64-bit GPU and the performance improvement was remarkable." Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 is also optimized for multi-core systems and is GPU-accelerated for real-time effects, color correction, faster rendering and speedy multilayer performance. read more...