Associated Press switches to Premiere pro

[Michael Hendrix]

Its all I’m sayin… I do know of one major sports group is rumored to be changing to Premiere and my guess is not so much as how good Premiere is but integration with other Adobe apps and Prelude seems to be turning a few brows.

For me, I am trying it fully on a project this week, start to finish. So we will see, but all I know, is our IT department is pushing for me to make a decision as they have just Certified CS6 and want to reimage our computers with new OS and software.

[Michael Sanders]

AP’s head office in Camden was originally a Gin warehouse for Gordon’s gin and is called The Interchange because its where gin went from the canal boats to the railways.

In 1990-91 the building was bought by Worldwide TV News (WTN) – which was formed from the joint operation of United Press and ITN (UPITN). When we moved there in 1992 the operation was based around Betacam SP and featured one of the first Odetics cart machines in the UK. Feeds would come in via satellite and get recorded on to Beta SP. The story would get recut down to time with the rubbish/horror/reframes etc taken out on one of 10 or so machine to machine Beta SP edit suites. There were also two studios (one dedicated to chromakey and the ITV weather) and a couple of three machine suites used for the magazine show’s based around vista’s and ACE25’s.

AP started their TV news operation from scratch in 1994 but in 1999 bought WTN and merged the two TV operations into one at Camden. Last I heard they had switched in around 2000 to a form of non linear editor so the journo’s could do their own editing. I can’t remember if it was Avid newscutter or Quantel EQ.

As I’m not really news based now I couldn’t tell you what happened over the past 10 years but I do know the head of ops so I could find out..

It could be that with the switch to HD a change was due but heres the interesting bit that occurred to me last night:

AP make ENPS (Essentential/Electronic News Production System). ENPS is in use in virtually every TV and radio newsroom around the globe (including all the biggies like the BBC and ITN).

I would suggest Adobe’s plan is simple: Get Premier etc working tightly with ENPS and there’s a sodding big market. Even if integration isn’t on the cards, marketing by interference is great: If the provider of your main news production s/w uses Premier who are you to argue!

Also as I said I’m sure AP is pretty much PC based so that reduces the choice…

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Michael Sanders]

Which is all a shame as I reckon FCP X with its keyword search and multi event set up would work a killer in a news environment.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[David Lawrence]

I think another key take away from the announcement is this:

“We evaluated every major editing solution on the market, and Adobe Premiere Pro provided the best-in-breed solution we needed,” says David Hoad, AP director of global video technology. “This was not only for its professional editing capabilities, but also for its integration with our Miranda and Gallery SIENNA asset management systems.”

Asset management is a huge deal for any large production enterprise, representing a major investment in time, money and infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how interesting or theoretically flexible Apple’s organization system in FCPX is. Enterprise customers will always demand an open system that works the way they want it to and connects to infrastructures of their own design. The risk of Apple’s proprietary system alone, likely makes it untenable for many enterprise users.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
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[Joseph W. bourke]

Hi Michael –

ENPS and Premiere Pro have been working together for some time – Adobe’s initial foray into the collaboration was making ENPS work for Hearst Corporation, and incorporating it into their 28 broadcast stations.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Dennis Radeke]

[Michael Sanders] “Also as I said I’m sure AP is pretty much PC based so that reduces the choice…”

They are primarily Mac based in the US at least. I can’t comment on other geos.

[Michael Sanders]

Thank you – I stand corrected.

Last time I saw an AP TV journo in the field in the UK, I was sure he was using a PC – it was wrong of me to base everything on that but just looking at the specs for ENPS though it only runs on Windows.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Aindreas Gallagher]

Hey – I checked – they’re editing on macs.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Michael Sanders]

Oh well – wrong again thanks for the clarification.

Makes the choice even more interesting…

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Jeremy Garchow]

I haven’t read the article, but I would think the CS broad native format support makes this an easy decision.

Imx, XDCam, p2, MXF, being able to ingest and output all of these fairly easily in the CS would be a huge help in news organizations.

There’s also “growing” (think streaming) MXF file support built right in to Pr now as well.

While I think a lot of us think creatively on this forum, my guess is that this decision was made on a lot of technical merit for which Adobe has some great things going.

Jeremy