Premiere Pro World Conference – Year One!

Adobe blogs by Meagan Keane

Last weekend marked the first annual Premiere Pro World Conference ably organized by Adobe training partner – Future Media Concepts. Although Premiere Pro Product Manager Al Mooney jokingly referred to it as a “1.0 beta” event, we all thought it was a great success, both for attendees and for the Premiere Pro team.

The conference kicked off on Friday, July 11th at Adobe headquarters in San Jose, CA. The Premiere Pro management, engineering and quality engineering teams were all there, along with support team members from social media, customer care, documentation, Creative Cloud Learn, marketing and even engineers from After Effects and Adobe Anywhere.

“Adobe Day” began with the history of Premiere Pro, presented by Senior Engineering Manager Dave McGavran. First launched in 1991, our favourite editing application has seen approximately 50 releases over the past 23 years, and today comprises a whopping 30 million lines of code. A highlight of the presentation was when Senior Solutions Consulting Manager Dave Helmly launched the Adobe Premiere 1.0 on an old PowerMac G3 running Mac OS 7. Talk about blast from the past!

Al Mooney then spoke about the future of Premiere Pro (in general terms, anyway) and attendees were introduced to different members of the Premiere Pro management team. The managers explained a bit about how the software is developed and what role each part of the team plays in the process.

A hot topic of discussion was how decisions are made about which features we develop. Al explained that several years ago the team decided to focus strongly on the broadcast market, for one simple reason: “because it’s really, really hard.” The rationale being that if in the end we can make it work for broadcast, we can make it work for other users (but not necessary the other way around). Today, while Premiere Pro continues to score big in broadcast (a recent international sporting event held in Brazil comes to mind), we’re also working with top Hollywood filmmakers, such as David Fincher, the Coen Brothers, and others. Heck, even Sharknado 2 was cut in Premiere Pro! read more...