Revisionist History…

[Andy Patterson]

[Bill Davis] “Had to laugh as I read the initial copy at how studiously they’ve avoided the inconvenience that the original program was basically single handedly written by Randy Ubillos before he went to Apple to build FCP into the powerhouse it would become.”

Randy went to Apple?

Didn’t Randy work for Macromedia when he developed KeyGrip? Didn’t Apple buy KeyGrip from Macromedia and rename it FCP?

[Bill Davis] “Doubt there’s a lick of Randy’s original code left in the program. But still, it must a bit awkward to do a huge birthday celebration – and not be able to mention the guy that created it in the first place.”

Why couldn’t they mention Randy? Didn’t Wes Plate once work for Adobe? Does he now work for Apple? I think it depends on what Adobe wants to do. I am not sure if mentioning Randy would have much meaning for people 40 years old or younger.

Would it be important for the 25th anniversary of FCP for Apple to mention FCP was bought from Macromedia by Apple?

[Tom Sefton]

https://alex4d.com/notes/item/back-to-1-0-randy-ubillos-interview

Wrote first 3-4 versions of premiere himself and then left to join macromedia. Macromedia took an age to release their first video product that he was building and in the meantime Apple bought them, which meant his work went into producing final cut.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Steve Connor]

[Bill Davis] “Had to laugh as I read the initial copy at how studiously they’ve avoided the inconvenience that the original program was basically single handedly written by Randy Ubillos before he went to Apple to build FCP into the powerhouse it would become.
“

Certainly it’s a bit rude to not mention Randy but I’m not sure you could call it revisionist as they haven’t tried to change or refocus the history of PPro.

[Oliver Peters]

I doubt there was any overt effort to not mention him. After all, I didn’t see any mention of anyone else from Adobe other than customers. If you look at Adobe’s blog posts, like from Bill Roberts, his bio clearly mentions his past position at Avid.

However, the simpler truth is probably that most of the folks on the PR side are probably young enough to not even know who Randy is. Any yes, the app was largely rewritten after Randy’s version 4 and then modified a couple of times again.

Ironically, if you look at the individuals inside Apple and Adobe, and who is related to whom, those folks are all a lot closer than most people think.

Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

For the editing history buffs, I would highly recommend John Buck’s ebooks:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/timeline-digital-1/id612514761?mt=11

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/timeline-analog-1/id787720231?mt=11

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/timeline-analog-4/id986252378?mt=11

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tim Wilson]

John has also posted excerpts along the way, including an AMAZING retelling of the origin’s of Apple’s acquisition of Keygrip in Steve Jobs’ thwarted efforts to license Adobe Premiere!

Jobs had new consumer Macs in development that would use Firewire I/O for the first time. He knew that the technology would make for a paradigm shift in desktop editing so he decided to ship a video editing application with the new computers.

Jobs approached Adobe Systems, and asked them to create a consumer version of Premiere that Apple could bundle with the unreleased Mac code-named Kihei. With Apple’s future still uncertain, and Premiere sales growing on the Wintel platform, Adobe said no.

Feel free to insert your own punchline about the relative merits of 1997-vintage Premiere for pros vs. consumers here.

Steve then turned his attention to building the app in-house with alumni from NeXT when the the Macromedia opportunity came along the following year. That story also had a number of twists along the way, not least of which is that a large part of its development team worked in Windows — which is indeed the platform I saw Final Cut demoed on at NAB 1998, in a word-of-mouth-only basement corner behind some pipe-and-curtain walls. Final Cut was dual-platform, they assured us, but being demoed on Windows because there were no Macs powerful enough to support its full performance. ???? Specifically, the show-stopper, real time dissolves. ????

And indeed, my beta disk for Final Cut (yes, I still have it) ran on WINDOWS (listed first) as well as Mac.*

I do also have my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt, which I’ve never posted a picture of before. I’ll post it after I take a picture of it on my next good hair day, I promise.

Buck spoke with many of the principals at length along the way for his book, and has some great stories about their hesitancy to come to Apple, which had by no means established that it could even stay in business. (Indeed, 5 years later, Apple stock was still in the single digits.)

Final Cut’s product manager, Tim Myers recalls: We were pretty unsure about whether a move to Apple at that time was going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It certainly wasn’t in its second wave of success, far from it and it was very questionable whether they were going to be able to pull it off. And a lot of us were thinking if Apple is struggling just selling computers right now why would they want to support and sell an editing product?

Much more here, and of course in the books, which I also highly recommend….but certainly one aspect of revisionist history is that acquiring Final Cut had ANYTHING to do with Avid, when in fact it had NOTHING to do with Avid and selling high-end Macs, and much more to do with Apple’s failed attempt to coax Adobe into developing a consumer edition of Premiere to help sell iMacs!

THAT thread of the story does indeed bear its fruit as Randy invested so much effort into iMovie, and the extent to which FCPX is in fact not too far off iMovie Pro in the sense of fulfilling the vision Steve had of video editing on the Mac from the beginning, and why I think Steve was so gleeful about slamming a shovel into the head of the zombieware that FCP Legacy had become the second he possibly could.

*Also not much discussed anymore is how close Final Cut came to being absorbed as the front end for what became Media 100’s Windows-only 844/x.

This notion was incredibly frustrating to those of us in the Mac-only Media 100 community, who’d have preferred M100 to be keeping their eye on the ball for 100% of their current customer base, and buying this software Keygrip that we’d been hearing about for their MAC front end.

M100’s perspective was that their current Mac front end was just dandy (and in some ways, certainly was — there’s something about its simplicity that has yet to be replicated in as satisfying a way by anyone) — but the company wanted to a) show off their hardware technology on machines more powerful than Apple was willing to make, and b) hedge their bets against Apple going under altogether.

The irony of course being that what finally sent Media 100 into the wilderness to wander before Boris Yamnitsky brought it home was the mad rush of Media 100’s Mac customer base virtually 100% into Final Cut Pro! THAT was the migration that fueled its growth, NOT a migration from Avid that never happened in any broad way. It only took a few years for the Media 100 user base to BECOME the FCP customer base, which is why the supposed “Cold Mountain moment” was irrelevant for anyone but a handful of pundits — a million Media 100 customers had already made the move, and the rest of the heart of FCP’s base had never for an instant considered Avid (nor for that matter Media 100) as an option. Their roots were sunk directly into FCP from the beginning.

But I gotta tell ya, we were biting our nails following along with the rumors of a bidding war between Apple to run it as their software on Mac (of course) vs. Media 100 to run it on Windows…while we were half-praying for a miracle and hoping that somehow it would wind up as the new Media 100 on Mac….which, again, in practice, it pretty much did.

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Edit 1: You can buy John’s book on all the usual ebook platforms, but go for the iPad versions. John told me that he’s done a lot of “beauty” work there that other platforms don’t really support. (I believe him: I’m a hardcore Kindle guy, but man o man, Amazon’s typesetting is AWFUL, and of course my Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t do pix at all.)

Also, John updates these all the time, so your purchase will only grow in value. ????

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Edit 2: Stand by for our EXCLUSIVE excerpts from Timeline Analog 4: 1989-1991 for the origins of Premiere as Reel Time, and Timeline Analog 5: 1991-1996, including never-before-published interviews detailing the earliest days of Premiere’s transition from postage-stamp proof-of-concept to actual broadcast video editing. You’re going to be FLOORED by what you read.

While you’re waiting, you should just go ahead and download these two volumes, though. At $2.99 each, a bargain. ????

[Steve Connor]

[Tim Wilson] “I do also have my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt, which I’ve never posted a picture of before. I’ll post it after I take a picture of it on my next good hair day, I promise.”

I’d be happy if I could actually FIT into any of my T-shirts from the 1990s!

[Andrew Kimery]

While it covers more than just editing, I would have to add “Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution” to the ‘must read’ list. Amazing book about a pretty small group of guys that fathered everything from digital VFX to NLEs to 3D animation.

https://www.amazon.com/Droidmaker-George-Lucas-Digital-Revolution/dp/0937404675

[Bill Davis]

Just want to re-boot the original point.

The guy who CREATED the program
Isn’t mentioned in the 25th Anniversary marketing push.

Lots of ways to spin irony in the corporate playbook – this is a pretty solid one.

(By the way, just in case somebody believes I’m shilling for a friend, I’ve actually NEVER met Mr. Ubillos. Even tho much of my professional life is based on products he created, the closest I’ve ever been to him is 15 feet away watching him speak to an audience. My own fault. I could have introduced myself at a point or two, but just never did. Oh well.)

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “The guy who CREATED the program isn’t mentioned in the 25th Anniversary marketing push.”

That doesn’t seem surprising at all. Neither are any of the other developers mentioned. So far, the only actual reference to anyone from Adobe that I’ve seen is a quote from Dave Helmly in one of their blogs. Dave is still at Adobe, but came in from CoSA.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com