Before you get too comfy in your switch . . . .

[Bret Williams]

I’m really starting to think the old rumor that they sold the Pro Apps division may be true. But as a public company shouldn’t it be of record. Sure would explain lots of stuff, especially recent discussion of legal ramifications if they were to start selling FCP 7 again.

I do think we’re digging too deep. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Follow the money. Between those two concepts I think lies the answer. I don’t think they can plan as deeply and as long term as is being discussed. Too much can happen. Their options need to be broader and more open.

It’s becoming obvious that FCP X was prematurely released because they had to. And it’s becoming obvious that there is no FCP 7 import because they were not permitted to do so. They could do it of course. They have 65 billion to throw at the problem. They could fix it if they wanted to or were allowed to legally. There is something going on and all will be revealed I’m sure. Very interesting stuff.

Another conspiracy theory I saw on the Avid forum. Apple has made this new paradigm and low price to get it in the hands of the next wave of users. Those that have never used an Avid or FCP 7 or Premiere and their standard paradigm. The reason? It will only be available for the mac. FCP 7 was too standard. Users could switch to MC or Adobe and get their hardware elsewhere. So – students use FCP X. They have to get macs. Over the years it’s the new thing. But nobody can “switch” because it’s so darn different. Just a theory but a simple one. And the point to keep people on mac hardware. Apple is a hardware company so they say. And the numbers still show that. They’re not making tons of money on selling apps or renting videos. They are making bazillions (just a guess) on hardware. https://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/21/chart-where-apple-makes-its-money – and it’s part of the company mission statement. They make all this great interconnecting clouds and app stores and .macs etc. because it makes their hardware ecosystem better and more attractive and lucrative.

Whatever they’re doing, they doing it to sell more iPads, phones, macs, devicex’s, etc.

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Craig Seeman] ” Thunderbolt is a Video Post tool”

Actually, it is not. It is a serialized version of PCI Express limited, currently, to just 4 lanes. If I were a betting man, I would bet that Apple is going to remove PCI Express slots from the next Mac Pro because Apple believes that everyone wants to throw out their investments in PCI Express cards and no one needs all that bandwidth that is currently in their Mac Pros.

[Hector Berrebi]

[Craig Seeman] “It may well open the door for Sony if they can put together a workstation competitive to HPZ series for example.”

That would be the day… Lol
A Vaio workstation 🙂 optimized for Vegas.

It’s hard for me to believe they ever will… And if they ever do, hard to believe it would be anything close to HPZ series.

Hector Berrebi
prePost Consulting

[Craig Seeman]

It’s fast enough for Video I/O and throughput for storage.

What 8, 16 (or 32 lane for that mater) cards will suffer? GPU is still going to be built in in 16 lane slot. Granted adding a second one might be an issue with only 4 lane Thunderbolt

Currently Mac Pro has one 16 lane slot with GPU, an empty 16 lane slot (I believe which can allow for a second GPU) and two more 4 lane slots.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Craig Seeman] “That Avid and Adobe may also have to go through a major change if they need to support it.
That Apple, which controls Quicktime, may muck with that in ways that impact Avid and Adobe negatively.”

[Jeff Bernstein] “As one who helped create QuickTime in the early years, I can tell you that Avid and Adobe have well-placed fears of entrusting the core of their products to Apple.”

These are good points and would be considerations if Adobe were dependent on Quicktime. Wherever possible we work around the QT libraries, primarily because of it’s 32-bit limitation. This is how we achieved good performance with Canon 5Dmk2 .MOV files. The two key codecs that I think of where we have to use the QT libraries are ProRes and DNxHD. In the case of the former, ProRes seems pretty optimized for QT and so we play and edit it just as well as FCP 7. For DNxHD, the editing experience is okay but definitely not great.

The point is that Adobe, like any company doing business, wants to shield itself from future problems. As many have pointed out on this thread, Apple’s practices can be harmful sometimes to other companies. Therefore, we do as much as we can to limit the dependencies of Adobe and our customers.

Moving forward to anticipate your next question – No, I do not know what Adobe will do with AV Foundation. 😉 Did I guess right? I will say that we have been working with Lion for a long time.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Tim Wilson] “A big difference, though. Adobe DID drop Mac support when Premiere Pro was introduced in 2003. BOOM, gone, no Mac support for what used to be a Mac-only product. No warning. Gone, overnight. No path forward except on Windows. For FOUR YEARS.”

While I wasn’t at Adobe at the time I can say that part of the reason that they didn’t immediately move to Mac was that they were doing a complete re-write of Premiere at the time which became Premiere Pro 1.0. The enormity of that task coupled with FCP’s rise may have accounted for Adobe initially being Windows only.

By Premiere Pro 2.0, we were hearing loud and clear that Mac people wanted in on the action and beginning with Premiere Pro CS3, we once again became cross platform and have no intention of moving from that position moving forward. With CS5, Adobe did another complete rewrite and ported Premiere Pro and After Effects to 64-bit on both platforms, so we have a solid foundation from which to build on for years to come.

Sorry for the mild history lesson,
Dennis – Adobe

[Hector Berrebi]

[Dennis Radeke] ” For DNxHD, the editing experience is okay but definitely not great.”

ok Dennis… no questions on AVF, (can we start calling it that?)

but Avid’s DNX is actually optimized for MXF, is it so complicated for premiere to properly support it? (it does somehow, but less than satisfactory)

i thought MXF was rather open…
RED’s free REDCINE-X does a great job writing them for one… and there are many other tools around to read and write these files..

for a short wonderful time it was even possible to open Avid’s AAF in premiere and link to media… now its broken… last time i checked it worked only for DV files…

i know this lost connection to original thread… sorry 🙂

hector

Hector Berrebi
prePost Consulting

[Tim Wilson]

[Dennis Radeke] “part of the reason that they didn’t immediately move to Mac was that they were doing a complete re-write of Premiere at the time which became Premiere Pro 1.0…..”

I hoped I didn’t imply any disrespect to Adobe. It was the right call.

I was working at Boris FX at the time, making plug-ins to support Premiere Pro and nearly two dozen other NLEs, including Final Cut Pro and Media Composer. Before that, I built my Mac-only business on…Macs. I was Mac-only, going back to February of 1984. I bought Premiere back when it was Mac-only.

But when I saw what Premiere Pro was doing on Windows, I had to admit that I simply couldn’t imagine that kind of performance on Mac. There was nothing, from any vendor, to suggest that it was even vaguely possible any time in the forseeable future.

And you know what? There WASN’T any way to get that kind of performance on Mac anytime soon. That’s why nobody else did it. It wasn’t possible.

And you know what else? There’s still not another NLE on Mac that offers that kind of raw performance.

I wasn’t Mac-only by the end of 2001, partly because of what I saw in Premiere Pro. I bought the exact laptop that Adobe used for the Premiere Pro demo I saw at Boris FX. Same color and everything.

Okay, an observational tangent.

The fact is that, as a platform, Mac has not been well optimized for third-party power. Now THAT may have been a factor for Adobe, and maybe Avid…but in the end, there are soooo many examples of cross-platform software performing better on Windows. It’s not because vendors “like” Windows better. It’s that Microsoft and their hardware partners for CPUs and GPUs aggressively support third-party power…because for them, there are pretty much ONLY third parties.

Again, speaking personally, my guess is that every hardware and software partner that Apple has ever had is waiting for the other anvil to drop, because they’ve seen it again and again.

Aaaaand, we’re back.

The turns in Premiere’s path couldn’t possibly have worked out better for Mac customers.

Which is exactly my point. Look at the product, and weigh it against your needs. Ignore the misinformation and fuzzy memories, and even accurate but irrelevant ones. There are no good reasons to make bad choices.

[Tim Wilson]

The usual disclosures. Everybody I’ve mentioned is a COW advertiser. I do not speak for Creative COW here.

I have bought all 3 NLEs I discuss. My primary NLE as the owner of a video production company was Media 100. My time as a third-party software partner with Adobe and Apple extended to my time working at Avid. In the context of trying to be historically accurate about complicated pasts, I was only talking here about Premiere Pro, and not its relevance as a choice for any particular customer.

I prefer chocolate shakes to be made with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce, rather than with chocolate ice cream. I’m not sure why, but that just seems wrong.

I like them both a lot, but evaluated from a distance, I prefer Dick Sargent, who it turns out was offered the gig even before Elizabeth Montgomery.

Julie Newmar IS Catwoman. Sorry, she just is.

Anything else you’d like me to disclose, just ask.

[Don Walker]

[Tim Wilson] “Anything else you’d like me to disclose, just ask.”
Kirk or Picard?

don walker
texarkana, texas

John 3:16