∞ Interview: Adobe discusses Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro

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Adobe made a very smart move on Wednesday offering disgruntled Final Cut Pro users an easy way to switch to Premiere Pro for their video editing needs. I sat down with Premiere’s product manager to discuss the market and what’s happening with Premiere Pro and what effect Final Cut Pro X has had on its business.

[ad#Google Adsense 300x250 in story]Many Final Cut Pro users have complained that the latest version of the app is not that useful for professionals. This misstep has given Adobe an open door to show users Premiere Pro. While Adobe has taken advantage of the opportunity, the company said they are just expressing their strengths.

“We’re not changing anything on the back of what’s happened in the past couple of weeks [with Final Cut Pro],” Al Mooney, Product Manager, Premiere Pro at Adobe Systems, told The Loop. “As a result of this more people are trying Premiere Pro, and that’s great.”

Yesterday I pointed out that Adobe posted video tutorials and documents to help Final Cut Pro users switch to Premiere. The results have been good for Adobe, but Mooney pointed out that people have been switching for some time.

“This isn’t the beginning of people switching, we’re just stepping it up,” said Mooney.

When asked specifically if more customers were contacting Adobe after the release of Final Cut Pro, Mooney said, “absolutely, it’s been really striking.”

Mooney said that Adobe is looking at more than just offering users the short term benefits with its latest push. The company is showing users that the Premiere Pro platform is something that can fill all of their editing needs from now on.

“This is not just a marketing push,” said Mooney. “We’ve been making a real effort to ensure that the learning curve with Premiere Pro is shallow. The application uses fundamental, established paradigms. We want it to be an intuitive app.”

Adobe says its seen growth from less than 1 million seats of Premiere Pro in 2006 to 2.3 million in 2010. Mooney credits Adobe’s pro users, but also the amount of new people that are coming into the video editing space, for the growth.

“We have been doing this for a long time,” said Mooney. “During the process of building the application, we have been talking to editors to find out what they need. Part of our strength is that we listen to our customers and build products to solve their problems.

“You have to innovate as well as solve problems. You have to do both,” said Mooney.


  • http://twitter.com/ShawnKing Shawn King

    FCPX users should definitely switch to Adobe Premiere because Adobe would *never* pull the rug out from under its users…Nope…they wouldn’t do it…..never have….never will….they have way too much respect for their user base to *ever* do something like that….nope…not gonna happen….

    • http://weblog.bergersen.net/jarle/ Jarle Dahl Bergersen

      Am I hearing the thick sarcasm from an Audition user? Because what Apple did with Final Cut X, Adobe did with Audition. Nothing new there. And Adobes path of various programs is a path filled with killed off software.

      • Gustav

        Adobe did it with Premiere itself. There’s a five year gap in Premiere’s history where there was no current Mac version, but four Windows releases.

      • Anonymous

        No, Adobe pulled the plug on Premiere at version 5 for Mac users, only to come crawling back a couple years later as the Mac market starting picking up steam again.  The point being… Apple has lost people’s trust through recent events.  However, moving over to Adobe for any form of security in future product direction isn’t necessarily the right move either.  Just prior to Apple creating Final Cut Pro, Avid was embracing Windows and was threatening to leave the Mac, etc.   Choose your poison.

  • Randy Fan

    Final Cut Pro X was designed by Randy Ubillos. Adobe Premiere 1.0 was designed by Randy Ubillos.  Final Cut Pro 1.0 was designed by Randy Ubillos. iMovie 8/9 was designed by Randy Ubillos. Maybe, just maybe, the guy behind FCP X knows quite a bit about editing video on a computer?

  • http://twitter.com/ShawnKing Shawn King

    No one disputes that. The story isn’t about Randy Ubillos. Maybe you meant to post this somewhere else? :)

    • Randy Fan

      This is exactly where I meant to post this.

    • Sean

      I’m guessing what ‘Randy Fan’ is trying to say by name dropping Rany Ubillos is that, with Final Cut Pro, video editing is at a fork in the road, with the short cut to the future that way (with FCPX), and the status quo/long road that way (with Premier, Avid, Etc.). 

      But what I don’t think ‘Randy Fan’ is taking into account is that, with all of the FCPX missing features, Apple has put a giant ditch in front of that path to the future, and for those that want to take that path, some will be able to jump across safely and easily, while others (the ones who have a backpack full of older projects, as well as ways of working that need the higher end features) are most likely going to not make the leap easily and fall in the ditch and get a lot of scrapes a bruises. Most people with the heavy packs, I’m guessing, are going to opt to take the long road rather than try and jump the ditch.

      Luckily for me, I rarely do any video editing, so I’m out of this argument on what path to take… …Off to watch some cat videos… see ya! 

  • Msoile7

    “Am I hearing the thick sarcasm from an Audition user? Because what Apple did with Final Cut X, Adobe did with Audition.”
    Audition is the default soundtrack editor in CS5.5, perhaps you meant Soundbooth?  But if you meant Soundbooth, then you would know that Audition is merged with Soundbooth.  Either way, your point makes no sense at all.  If there’s anything wrong with Audition, it’s that they hadn’t done anything with it since around 2006, there’s way better DAWs on the market.

    If you wanted to look at defunct software from Adobe, the closest you would get is their keying software Ultra, but in CS5, they integrated it as a plugin, and it was never a stand-alone.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/3M7U73TMW54LPZ5C25ZXU6BTTY Adam Chew

    This will blow over like antennagate.

    Will the editors delete FCP7 from their Macs, maybe but the stupid ones will.

    • http://twitter.com/KenInCO Ken Johnson

      Why do so many people who are not editors and have never used FCP feel the need to throw in their completely uninformed opinions on this? Pros depend on FCP to put food on the table. When you remove features that are REQUIRED to get the job done, those people will not soon forget. People running a business will switch to the competition if they feel that they can’t count on Apple. I am a part time event videographer who is thinking about going full time. I have used FCP for 8 years. Releasing this without major features like multi-cam editing and the ability to easily round trip projects to and from other applications makes this unusable for me. I will be sticking with my old version of Final Cut Studio for now. I will also be taking a long, hard look at Avid and Adobe between now and the first major update to FCP X. Apple will have a hard time convincing to stay with them, but we’ll see how they respond to this fiasco. 

      • Anonymous

        Pros also pay attention to the state of things and understand that FCPX is a total rewrite with all new interface they will have to relearn. Plus like all new software from Apple it might have bugs and have a few things turned off for the first handful of weeks. And they understood this back in April. And they know that Apple EOLs software the moment the new thing is out. So back in April they sorted out if they needed more copies of FCS and got them. 

        And now they are working in FCS and learning FCPX while things get cleaned up. The real pros knew coming in that they weren’t going to be in a position to use FCPX for any projects until Jan 2012 and they are fine with it. 

      • Gustav

        Why do so many of those upset with FCPX assume that everyone who is not with them is not an editor. There are many types of editing workflows. And FCPX will meet the needs of a lot of them. There are some that FCPX don’t meet.

        And well, for the few that actually aren’t editors, it’s perfectly valid for them to comment on the “sky is falling” attitude as long as they don’t make assumptions about the features themselves.

  • Adam

    I have found FCPX a bit unstable, so whilst I’ll use it for home videos, I’ll use FCP7for paid jobs. Apple are going to add features and improve stability. At present FCPX has alot of great features that will helpmost web video and corporate Filmmakers achieve their goals. This is a transitional period, if you gotta jump, fair enough, but in a short while methinks Pro users will come creeping back.

  • Infinity Films

    premiere is a good looking program, when i see TUTs on youtube, but at the same time, from a user’s standpoint, my previous library of clips seem no to be compatible with PREMIERE pro CS3. i have been spending all day trying to get converter footage downloaded, just so I can be able to import footage into Premier. On top of that, the current footage that i have tried to import is useless, because there seems to be several different types of MP4 formats, which makes no sense. 

    that, i would have to say is a deal breaker. there is no update or plugin as of yet that TRULY SUPPORTS ALL FORMATS. 

    do not be fooled by premiere. it’s not as easy as you think it is. 

    if you can’t even do the most simplest of tasks, which is THE MOST “IMPORT”ANT, then i don’t see having faith in Premiere.

    ADOBE, step your SH^T up!!!!