An Adobe fanboy speaks

[shashbugu]

Adobe's success in the professional world highly depends on their ability to work with highend effects, grading and finishing tools like Scratch, Smoke, Quantel, Filmlight, Nucoda, the Foundry etc. All these companies depend on the ease of editorial material going in and out of FCP. Thats why they always advertise their products as easily compatible with FCP and MC. This is one of the main reasons FCP is getting so popular in the film and broadcast worlds. Case In point NAB 2011, every onset and post application vendor was touting their ability to work with FCP. Even Adobe thrives on touting their ability to work with FCP

The advent of FCPX is a godsend for Adobe. Adobe can be scared and sent scrambling to add competing features or they can capitalize on it.
Many Post facilities already have PPro CS5 installed to get footage in and out of AE. These facilities have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in highend tools that need to ingest edl's from editorial.
Avid MC has not really pulled its weight and has remained mostly an offline editor (a very good one at that).
FCPX seems to claim to be able to do everything, this is a scary thought to third party vfx and finishing post tools as well as the facilities that use those tools. In the real world and NLe's don't exist on their own and third party applications are needed.

There are only 6 competing worthy NLE's (the latter two Vegas and Edius are not............) leaving, PP, FCP, MC and LW to duke it out.

Its very clear that Adobe has conquered the online multimedia world with their products, but film and broadcast.........

It is time for Adobe to step up to the plate. Adobe's third party vendor relations team (if they even have one,) needs to identify all these companies, build patronizing relationships with them, identify the issues related to their products working with Adobe edls, fix them, and even go beyond that to offer them DYNAMIC LINK type interoperability. The future is not in XML, the future is in dragging and dropping a sequence in a product and having do all the XML transfer in the background, all updates from the third party software just immediately show up in Adobe. Adobe has the technology and the know how to do this to do this. Most of those third party companies are small to medium firms who would be very excited to have their products work seamlessly in editorial. Cross collateralized productivity promotion will further enhance Adobe's powerful products.

In the mean time Adobe can keep developing its own plugin architecture to allow third party plugins to harness MPE.

Full disclosure, I will still buy FCPX, because its a very interesting product and at $299 why not? But in the same token I am pretty sure there are many people like me who will take over a year to adapt to the change and will still rely on the traditional simplicity of PP. The is no reason besides cost to not have two different applications.

Thank you.

 

[David McGavran]

Adobe's success in the professional world highly depends on their ability to work with highend effects, grading and finishing tools like Scratch, Smoke, Quantel, Filmlight, Nucoda, the Foundry etc. All these companies depend on the ease of editorial material going in and out of FCP. Thats why they always advertise their products as easily compatible with FCP and MC. This is one of the main reasons FCP is getting so popular in the film and broadcast worlds. Case In point NAB 2011, every onset and post application vendor was touting their ability to work with FCP. Even Adobe thrives on touting their ability to work with FCP

The advent of FCPX is a godsend for Adobe. Adobe can be scared and sent scrambling to add competing features or they can capitalize on it.
Many Post facilities already have PPro CS5 installed to get footage in and out of AE. These facilities have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in highend tools that need to ingest edl's from editorial.
Avid MC has not really pulled its weight and has remained mostly an offline editor (a very good one at that).
FCPX seems to claim to be able to do everything, this is a scary thought to third party vfx and finishing post tools as well as the facilities that use those tools. In the real world and NLe's don't exist on their own and third party applications are needed.

There are only 6 competing worthy NLE's (the latter two Vegas and Edius are not............) leaving, PP, FCP, MC and LW to duke it out.

Its very clear that Adobe has conquered the online multimedia world with their products, but film and broadcast.........

It is time for Adobe to step up to the plate. Adobe's third party vendor relations team (if they even have one,) needs to identify all these companies, build patronizing relationships with them, identify the issues related to their products working with Adobe edls, fix them, and even go beyond that to offer them DYNAMIC LINK type interoperability. The future is not in XML, the future is in dragging and dropping a sequence in a product and having do all the XML transfer in the background, all updates from the third party software just immediately show up in Adobe. Adobe has the technology and the know how to do this to do this. Most of those third party companies are small to medium firms who would be very excited to have their products work seamlessly in editorial. Cross collateralized productivity promotion will further enhance Adobe's powerful products.

In the mean time Adobe can keep developing its own plugin architecture to allow third party plugins to harness MPE.

Full disclosure, I will still buy FCPX, because its a very interesting product and at $299 why not? But in the same token I am pretty sure there are many people like me who will take over a year to adapt to the change and will still rely on the traditional simplicity of PP. The is no reason besides cost to not have two different applications.

Thank you.

Thank you for the nicely written post. I for one am not scared of FCPx. It might be pretty but they haven't talked about much interesting stuff yet. They mention 4k as max resolution. I didn't see Red demoed or actual playback for that matter. We will take a look at it when it comes out but we are energized not scared.

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us But our performance engine is now on version 2 and we are cross platform they might ship something in June... CS5.5 will be in use before then...

Cheers

Dave

 

[CK Olsen]

Thank you for the nicely written post. I for one am not scared of FCPx. It might be pretty but they haven't talked about much interesting stuff yet. They mention 4k as max resolution. I didn't see Red demoed or actual playback for that matter. We will take a look at it when it comes out but we are energized not scared.

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us But our performance engine is now on version 2 and we are cross platform they might ship something in June... CS5.5 will be in use before then...

Cheers

Dave

Is there an official ship date for CS5.5? If so, PLEASE POST!
Thanks,
CK

 

[Stephen Strangways]

It sure appears to me that FCPX is going the route of "one single app for the one-man band" and leaving behind the concept of the suite with specialized tasks. I love Vegas as a one single app when I am doing a project all myself at home, but the professional post work I do relies on a suite of specialized tools for different tasks and different people, and the ability to move projects between them. I can't imagine a shop all working in FCPX and jumping in on the same project. I think that's where Adobe's strength in the future will lie: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, And Encore, with strong interoperability between them.

Case in point: my current workflow for a 13-episode TV series is that the editor works in FCP, I import the XML into Premiere Pro and use that as a conform tool, replacing footage that had been transcoded to ProRes with the camera native formats that PPro can handle but FCP can't, and also the high-res or odd aspect ration shots that need to be custom cropped. From there, effects shots get sent to AE and back, then the edit is sent to Color (very soon to be Resolve) from there for finishing.

How did that all come about? Two things: When the limitations of FCP in handling native formats started holding things up or compromising image quality, it was the story of The Social Network's post workflow that inspired giving it a try, and it was extremely easy to do so, seeing as the company I work for already owned Premiere Pro - they had purchased Production Premium for AE and PS, and PPro was just a hidden bonus that had been largely ignored until then.

So I say, go forth Adobe, make the best suite full of specialized tools, that can all seamlessly communicate with each other, and the XML formats of competing (like FCP) and complimentary (like grading tools) applications.

 

[Tyler Bourns]

Is there an official ship date for CS5.5? If so, PLEASE POST!
Thanks,
CK

I believe they said Mid May. So only about a month away.

 

[andrewhake]

Thank you for the nicely written post. I for one am not scared of FCPx. It might be pretty but they haven't talked about much interesting stuff yet. They mention 4k as max resolution. I didn't see Red demoed or actual playback for that matter. We will take a look at it when it comes out but we are energized not scared.

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us But our performance engine is now on version 2 and we are cross platform they might ship something in June... CS5.5 will be in use before then...

Cheers

Dave

I am excited that more companies are getting serious about editing again. Compatibility and early support of new formats is great, but I hope there is a return to focus on actual editing and how the workflow can be improved.

To be fair here Apple completely redesigned FCP in the move to 64bit and other new technologies. And since when does Premiere use Grand Central Dispatch APIs? Does it?

 

[shashbugu]

Thank you for the nicely written post. I for one am not scared of FCPx. It might be pretty but they haven't talked about much interesting stuff yet. They mention 4k as max resolution. I didn't see Red demoed or actual playback for that matter. We will take a look at it when it comes out but we are energized not scared.

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us But our performance engine is now on version 2 and we are cross platform they might ship something in June... CS5.5 will be in use before then...

Cheers

Dave

I love the boldness. I cant wait for CS5.5's new Red implementation.

Thanks

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Thank you for the nicely written post. I for one am not scared of FCPx. It might be pretty but they haven't talked about much interesting stuff yet. They mention 4k as max resolution. I didn't see Red demoed or actual playback for that matter. We will take a look at it when it comes out but we are energized not scared.

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us But our performance engine is now on version 2 and we are cross platform they might ship something in June... CS5.5 will be in use before then...

Cheers

Dave

You guy have really been kicking ass as of late. Can't wait to dig into CS5.5. and quite excited about what's to come in future updates. Your presence on this forum is greatly appreciated as well. Keep up the good work.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

It sure appears to me that FCPX is going the route of "one single app for the one-man band"

You don't know that, and Apple has said that the other apps still are there ... they merely didn't talk about them.

This NAB event was an FCP oriented "sneak peak" not the full announcement of the next toolset which will include FCPX.

Looking around ... the Baselight plug-in makes much more sense. I expect that Color is integrated as a plug in based on what we saw in the demo ... but I also expect that Color will remain available as an evolved standalone app.

I also expect that FCP X will be a plug in to Color that handles the timeline (and hopefully sound!), as opposed to Color reimplementing that component.

Motion will be there too, despite obvious integration in FCP X, but again I expect FCP X will plug in and handle the timeline for Motion. (I am REALLY hoping for Motion to get nodes)

Of course .... there is nothing stopping Apple from getting rid of Color AND Motion, and replacing them with "Shake X" which is intended to do both color correction and effects in a modal node based interface, with a multilayer timeline (driven by FCP X) as an option.

OK, now I'm engaging in conjecture.

The main point is that Apple has said to "Stay Tuned" for more

http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/04/12/apple-says-stay-tuned-for-other-final-cut-studio-apps/

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

PPro CS5 was built on 64 bit, cocoa (mac), Grand Central Dispatch, and Cuda. Nice that Apple is trying to catch up with us

I didn't know that Grand Central was part of the CS5 or CS5.5 suites.

You might want to mention that a bit more prominently.

I am happy to see Adobe lead in this way- although I think FCP X will be my NLE of choice, I still eagerly look forward to using many of Adobe's other tools regularly.

OK enough ass kissing.

I'd like to know more about how GCD has played out for Adobe in terms of performance gains? Are you seeing regular full capacity use of all processors?

I'd also like to know if Adobe is thinking about background rendering and pre-processing? How about the magnetic timeline?

What about implementing OpenCL in addition to Cuda, like in Resolve?

Were there any other details you caught in the FCP X demo that you would like to implement in Premiere? Anything in Premiere you thought was missing in FCP X?

 

[David McGavran]

Is there an official ship date for CS5.5? If so, PLEASE POST!
Thanks,
CK

I don't think we said what day it was but it isn't far away... I already toasted with the teams...

Cheers

Dave

 

[David McGavran]

I am excited that more companies are getting serious about editing again. Compatibility and early support of new formats is great, but I hope there is a return to focus on actual editing and how the workflow can be improved.

To be fair here Apple completely redesigned FCP in the move to 64bit and other new technologies. And since when does Premiere use Grand Central Dispatch APIs? Does it?

We didn't even think it was worth mentioning Grand Central Dispatch. We have a cross platform threading api but when apple added GCD to 10.6 we took advantage of it. It gave us 10% performance on some thread dispatching so we took the boost. We have been shipping CS5 with GCD support for a year now. Apple is just playing catch up on the performance features...

Cheers

Dave

 

[David McGavran]

I didn't know that Grand Central was part of the CS5 or CS5.5 suites.

You might want to mention that a bit more prominently.

I am happy to see Adobe lead in this way- although I think FCP X will be my NLE of choice, I still eagerly look forward to using many of Adobe's other tools regularly.

OK enough ass kissing.

I'd like to know more about how GCD has played out for Adobe in terms of performance gains? Are you seeing regular full capacity use of all processors?

I'd also like to know if Adobe is thinking about background rendering and pre-processing? How about the magnetic timeline?

What about implementing OpenCL in addition to Cuda, like in Resolve?

Were there any other details you caught in the FCP X demo that you would like to implement in Premiere? Anything in Premiere you thought was missing in FCP X?

already responded about GCD so won't rehash it. Apple really didn't show enough for me to comment on. They didn't show playback, they didn't mention how they were using open cl, they said native but only showed h.264 and prores. They didn't show red. They showed some pretty ui features and good metadata handling. There are some nice ideas there but we are waiting to see an app to see what works and what doesn't.

We already have all sorts of pre-processing and background rendering. Warp stabilizer works in the background. Adobe Media Encoder can encode ae comps and ppro sequences in the background. Speech recognition works in the background, etc...

Open CL is just starting to be viable. The 1.0 spec wasn't able to be used. 1.1 is starting to become real. Should ship in a few months with lion and we will look seriously at us. Our investigation so far shows Open CL 1.1 at the quality of CUDA when we started 1.5 years ago. It is obviously important however.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Todd Kopriva]

> Is there an official ship date for CS5.5? If so, PLEASE POST!

Actually, we said "early May".

See the first paragraph of each of these posts for details on how to pre-order or be notified as soon as the software is available:
"What's new and changed in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5"
"What's new and changed in After Effects CS5.5"

 

[Tom Lowe]

It is time for Adobe to step up to the plate.

I agree.

Let me say: I had an extremely productive meeting at NAB with the AE and Premiere teams, which infused me with tremendous confidence about Adobe's future. Adobe seems determined to lead the way toward the 100% RAW workflow future.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

already responded about GCD so won't rehash it. Apple really didn't show enough for me to comment on. They didn't show playback, they didn't mention how they were using open cl, they said native but only showed h.264 and prores. They didn't show red. They showed some pretty ui features and good metadata handling. There are some nice ideas there but we are waiting to see an app to see what works and what doesn't.

We already have all sorts of pre-processing and background rendering. Warp stabilizer works in the background. Adobe Media Encoder can encode ae comps and ppro sequences in the background. Speech recognition works in the background, etc...

Open CL is just starting to be viable. The 1.0 spec wasn't able to be used. 1.1 is starting to become real. Should ship in a few months with lion and we will look seriously at us. Our investigation so far shows Open CL 1.1 at the quality of CUDA when we started 1.5 years ago. It is obviously important however.

Cheers

Dave

Thank you for your reply.

Its pretty much what I expected, but all your replies here are interesting and give me things to think about. So, thanks again.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

I've got my NAB discounted CS5.5 pre-ordered. To get the baselight grading tools of RedCineX inside Premiere is brilliant since RedCineX for Win7 is bug-o-riffic.

David, I don't know what the nerds have to do to either develop an intuitive real time grading tool or allow a 3rd party like Colorista to work with your MPE and the RedRocket but doing so would make PP simply awesome. I know there are MPE enabled grading tools in PP but they're totally ponderous. I can't make heads or tails out of how they work. Colorista layout is similar to grading tools like DaVinci and Pablo so without a lot of reading you're able to get what you want. And no, grading in AfterFX doesn't count since it's not realtime.

Keep the high-fives rolling with your team.

 

[David McGavran]

I agree.

Let me say: I had an extremely productive meeting at NAB with the AE and Premiere teams, which infused me with tremendous confidence about Adobe's future. Adobe seems determine to lead the way toward the 100% RAW workflow future.

We learned a lot from you as well! Thanks for taking your time!

Cheers

Dave

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Been on Adobe with Photoshop for several years, and now on Production Premium, just upgraded to 5.5 but will still for sure get FCPX,
as for some one just starting Editing like me I believe it has so much to offer, and then I can always take it to AE...

 

[David Collard]

Upgraded today to 5.5 suite. They said the shipping date was May 3rd.