My Adobe (Non-)Switch Story

Bruce's Blog on PVC by Bruce Johnson

Premiere Pro Works For Me
I can clearly remember my first experience with Adobe Premiere. It was in the early 1990’s, and I was working full-time in the News Department at Wisconsin Public Television. I had managed to talk the news director into buying me a really new-fangled device – a desktop computer. I believe it was a first-generation Pentium, maybe 90Mhz. I had been into computers since about 1984, and had composed music and scored a lot of TV programs using Atari computers. Geekery was in my blood. So once I got the Pentium, I was poised on the launching pad for what was to come.

And then I got a copy of Adobe Premiere, version 3 I think it was. And I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Strange, buggy, crash-prone, you name it, it was just not good.

I spent seven straight years on the roads of Wisconsin shooting news features with a reporter named Art Hackett. Art and I would crank out a seven-minute-or-so package every week, which invariably culminated in him giving me a script at about 2PM Friday afternoon for a 7PM program. In those days, non-linear editing for quick turnaround just had not been invented yet, so I spent my editing days in a three-machine BetaSP room with what I still consider to be the best purpose-built linear edit controller I ever used, the Sony 910. So I would get to work, with my half-dozen to dozen shot tapes, a reel-to-reel deck to play back voiceovers, and maybe a graphic or two on the stillstore. Sounds pretty primitive, doesn’t it? Well, back then it was the height of technology, but not for much longer. In the time that I was on the road, the Avid came to Wisconsin Public Television. The first versions were off-line machines only, but over the years the Media Composer became more functional and powerful, and eventually came to dominate most of the editing WPT was doing. read more...