The Three A’s, Apple, Adobe & Avid

The 2010 National Association of Broadcasters convention had the Post Production world buzzing about the Three A’s of the industry. Apple, Adobe and Avid. Well, really more Adobe and Avid since they were actually at the show and had something to demonstrate.

Adobe brought their CS5 creative suite to the show with some incredible announcements. Not the least of which to me is the ease of integration with other NLEs like Final Cut Pro and Avid. Adobe has decided to “play nice” with with their competitors to make it easier for Post Houses like mine to get projects into and out of After Effects for one. Right now this requires plug-ins like the Automatic Duck Importer for AE (which is totally awesome by the way), but with CS5, we could essentially take an FCP timeline, send it to Premiere and then send it over to AE. Ok, the Duck plug-in is around $500 and Premiere is $799 so it’s a bit silly to even consider Premiere just for this functionality. But……

Premiere has taken a huge step forward with their 64bit enabled Mercury Engine. Much more realtime functionality and you can see in their online demos 4k and 2k material scrubbing and playing back in the same timeline. You will have to install CS5 in a 64 bit system to run and run an Adobe Certified graphics board in order to take full advantage of the Mercury Engine functionality. But the functionality of Premiere is very much on par to what Final Cut Pro based facility are used to and the real-time functionality of the CS5 package simply blows FCP out of the water.

Avid brought us Media Composer 5 and what really got the show buzzing was their support of Quicktime. More specifically, Apple’s ProRes codec. So now there is the very real possibility of Avid working right alongside Final Cut Pro in the same facility or for sharing projects across facilities. read more...