Debra Kaufman of Creative Cow Interviews Bill Roberts of Adobe as They Prepare for NAB 2012
In this industry, you have to earn your stripes. Avid had to displace flat bed film editors. Apple had to get movies under its belt. With Adobe, it's been a different trajectory. If you look at motion graphics or visual effects, everyone thinks of After Effects and Photoshop, but Adobe has a different brand presence with Premiere Pro. Back when we first introduced Premiere Pro, there were of course some aspects that made editors happy, but other things related to how it worked or performance that, historically, got in the way. The turning point was when we introduced the Mercury Playback Engine in CS5 and all the native file types worked well. That's when the Premiere brand took a big leap upwards.
Then, of course, came the announcement of FCPX, which caused a lot of editors to start exploring different solutions. At the same time, we had just taken the power we'd delivered in Premiere Pro CS5 and layered on a ton of ease-of-use features in CS5.5, so when people came to look at it, they were pleased. We put together a fantastic promotion for those interested in switching to Premiere Pro and the response was exceptional -- we've seen tens of thousands of users make the switch from FCP and Media Composer.
I know there are some Mac users who point to the fact that Premiere Pro was off the Mac platform for several years. At the time, which was the turn of the 21st century, Apple was a very different company. Avid waffled around the Mac too; in fact, everyone at the time was questioning its viability. But Mac's stronghold has always been the creative community. The Mac platform today is a fantastic part of our business and a great place to be. In fact, our presence on the Mac grew 45 percent in 2010.
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