Will Adobe’s new Mercury technology provoke a sudden exodus from Final Cut Pro to CS5?

Tecno Tur on PVC by Allan Tepper

As has already been covered by Chris and Trish Meyer and other colleagues at ProVideo Coalition, Adobe’s new Mercury technology will be officially announced on April 12th, at the start of NAB 2010. Anyone who has seen a Mercury demonstration knows that it is quite impressive, and may attract a large number of Final Cut Pro users to “jump ship” and switch to CS5 when released. At the crux of the compelling features is not only that Premiere CS5 can natively edit long-GOP H.264 (i.e. raw footage from Canon 5D MKII, Canon 7D, and recent Kodak & Sanyo cameras) with real time transitions, and that of AVCHD camcorders —which also use the long-GOP H.264 códec (including very recent professional models from both Panasonic and Sony). I say “not only” because even Premiere CS4 has been able to do that. The big difference is that Premiere CS5 can do it easily and gracefully… even with several layers. especially (but not exclusively) when it has a supported GPU. As you can tell, for someone who would like to edit that raw footage natively and in real time, Adobe’s Mercury technology is potentially kryptonite for Apple’s continuing sales of Final Cut Studio. Of course, there is a possibility that Apple will shock us at NAB time with announcement of a new version of Final Cut Pro that will finally take advantage of MacOS 10.6’s (Snow Leopard’s) OpenCL-facilitating technology. That is properly spelled, and stands for Open Computing Language. It is also possible that one of the professional interface manufacturers (AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, or MOTU) will announce a way for their hardware to assist FCP to accomplish the same via OpenCL… or some other technology. read more...