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A Wake Up Call Revisited
Almost a year ago I submitted an idea for discussion. It was in the early days of Vista, and everybody knows now what seemed apparent to many even back then. Vista is not and will never be a viable platform for the kind of stuff that we (who participate in forums like this) do. XP was slower than 2000 by half, and Vista is slower than XP by an even greater margin.
Yes, the Mac is an alternative, but with the quality and installed base of Final Cut, Mac hardware is not an environment to realistically anticipate a competitive version of Premiere/Encore.
I think Adobe could benefit by considering the following; let’s call it THE ADOBE UBUNTU PRODUCTION SUITE.
It’s priced the same as the Windows or OSX versions. It comes bundled with Ubuntu and installs both OS and Suite at the same time on an unformatted hard drive. Adobe spec’s out the requirements, and half-a-dozen video cards have optimized drivers on the install disk. The same is true of audio, motherboard, and hard drives. It supports dual, quad core, and 2x quad core (for a maximum total of 8 supported cores).
Adobe supports the bundle with six months of support, after which you pay Adobe either per instance or for an additional period. This support includes both the OS and the production suite. Adobe only supports the range of hardware they have qualified. Outside of that, you’re on your own.
The Production Suite Premium version adds premium versions of specific programs like AfterEffects and Photoshop along with one other perk. There are two one-gig USB thumbs configured with a bootable barebones (text only) version of Ubuntu, along with the render engine for AfterEffects. These can be placed in ‘any’ (bootable by USB) computer on the network to render larger projects. Additional thumbs are available at $49.95 each. Each thumb is copy protected so you cannot duplicate it. In effect, you would have an on-demand cpu only rendering farm at $50 per slave PC without install and support issues.
This could put Adobe in a competitive position with Premiere again, without forcing it to compete head-to-head with Final Cut (on Mac hardware).
Would you buy it? I would!
ron
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2 Replies
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Ron,
You make some really good points, and I would indeed consider buying into Linux (again). But once again, let’s do the math. How long did it take Premiere to go back to Apple? Then compare that market share to Ubuntu. Adobe is clearly very careful about where it invests its money, a new OS development is extremely expensive.
It also seems that every couple of years an new linux based OS comes out. It wasn’t so long ago that Suze was all the rage. I used for a while until I realized that it wasn’t for me.
BTW, I am more worried about the many bugs appearing with CS3 than the Vista processing requirements. I think the slow down in Vista is almost non existent given the huge leap hardware processing has made in the past few years. I find Premiere on a quad or dual quad much more responsive than it ever was on any other OS in the past, even with uncompressed HD.
Vince
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Here’s my point. I’m not investing in a computer for Vista. I don’t even think it’s worthwhile for XP. My 3.2 cpu with 2G of RAM may not be a barn burner, but it gets the job done most of the time. It’s buggy on occasion, locked up yesterday to the point of forcing a reboot (for example). I like Final Cut on the Mac but you give up so much of the advantage that working fully inside a suite provides. And besides, that suite had its own share of bugs as well.
Even if I could get the CS2 or CS3 suite to run inside Linux, I would do that. I guess I’ve just reached the point after 25 years of Microsoft that I say ENOUGH. I’m not investing any more of my time or money in their products, period.
I wish I could leverage the considerable investment I’ve made in Adobe products elsewhere, but it looks like the Mac is the only alternative. And I won’t use Premiere on the Mac with Final Cut available. I’d move Photoshop and maybe After Effects, but not the suite.
I know what you’re thinking… it’s cheaper to move the suite, but I already have an OSX version of Photoshop CS2 (legal, of course). I got it personally to use on one of the computers at work but I moved to another site that doesn’t have macs.
As far as porting, I would imagine that much of the work has been done for OSX. I realize that user interface is a non-trivial task, but I guess it just seems worthwhile to me. Perhaps it doesn’t to Adobe.
Oh well, competition is a good thing, and there are new products and new suites out all the time. The open source movement has born much fruit and perhaps in time they, or Apple will come out with something to give a viable alternative to Adobe.
ron
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