Adobe Revives Premiere for Mac

[Roderick Usher]

If I recall correctly, when Soundbooth appeared (along with the accompanying uproar about it being Intel-only) it was revealed that Adobe had either licensed or purchased outright audio technology written, from the ground up, for x86 processors. I imagine they realized this, w/regard to Soundbooth (note: the numbers are purely for an example, they aren't meant to be real-world):

* It would cost us 0 dollars to not develop a Mac version of Soundbooth, and we would make 0 dollars by not doing so (heh, this is obvious - I just thought this sentence was funny.)
* It would cost us 10 million dollars (and lots of time) to make a completely, from-the-ground-up Universal version of Sound Booth, porting the library (if this is even possible) and we'd make 5 million dollars on sales.
* It would cost us 250 thousand dollars (2 programmers for nearly a year, or something) of time to create an Intel-only version of the software, and we'd make 2 million dollars on sales.

Seems to make sense to me. I'd imagine Premiere is similar (although even greater scale, since it's more popular.) Also, consider that they wouldn't have keep both PPC and x86 versions in parity, as they release upgrades, etc...

Although I doubt I'll ever use Premiere on an Intel Mac, I'm excited because Premiere is an application that frequently comes up in lists of software that don't exist on the Mac (in spite of the superiority of Final Cut Express/Pro).

Thank you. I wish more people in the Mac community would recognize this instead of the brickheaded knee-jerk crucifixion I see of so many Mac developers.

When Soundbooth for Mac was first announced, they stated quite plainly that Apple's move to Intel was a Very Good Thing (TM) for Mac development, because the hardware base is then the same across PCs and Macs and it takes less resources for them to optimize the code for computationally intensive software (video/audio/design apps). Look at the long term, not the short term. Intel-only will be the standard for Mac software, perhaps not as soon as some would like, but it will happen. Spout all the anecdotal evidence you want about how quickly companies move to new hardware, the Intel standard is inevitable, and in the long term Mac software will benefit enormously from the fact that it's not nearly as much work/expense as it used to be for software companies to simultaneously develop for PCs and Macs. This is good.

First you had development split between two totally different platforms - PPC/OS X and x86/Windows. During this transition hump, it's PPC-x86/OS X and x86/Windows. Eventually it will be x86/OS X and x86/Windows.

Which do you think is going to be cheapest for developers? Which do you think will be the most beneficial to Mac users?

 

[CmdrLaForge]

After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition and Encore are all parts of the suite...

Wow - then thats a heck of a suite even if you don't use Premiere itself but Final Cut instead.

 

[eric_n_dfw]

Why bother? Because if you wrote your application with any regard to cross platform development methodology (which you should be doing even if you intend to target only one platform, it goes hand in hand with encapsulation and OO design) - you should only have to click the little "PPC" box in XCode and build.

They built this from "scratch", and can't get it to compile on PowerPC? What did they do, write half of it in assembler?

Yes, they probably do have large sections of code written in assembler for the realtime and/or rendering speed that are x86 coded for the Win32 version of Premier already.

And I know people that still edit videos on their G3 iMacs, so don't tell me that dual core and Quad G5s are suddenly useless. A 2.0ghz dual G5 is still a high performance video editing box, and if it came down to having to buy a Mac Pro just to use Adobe's product, I'd stick with Final Cut.

I also use FCP 4 on a Dual G4 500Mhz (have used FCP 1, 2 and 3 on a G3 400 and G4 400 as well) - I'm quite happy editting since I usually only use cuts and disolves but when it comes to rendering for color correction or compositing and especially rendering the DVD, I yearn for a modern machine. Adobe is targeting a growing audience of Intel users rather than the us PPC users who's base will be shrinking.

 

[SPUY767]

Intel Mac may be a smaller % of the Mac base, but they have greater growth potential than the PowerPC Macs.

My newbie understanding of Universal Binary, was it was basically another check box on a compiler?

YOu have to follow some speci8fic coding rules, and the checkbox only applies if you're using XCode, adobe probably isn't, so no checkbox there.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

YOu have to follow some speci8fic coding rules, and the checkbox only applies if you're using XCode, adobe probably isn't, so no checkbox there.

Guys - it isn't really about that checkbox. Testing, testing, testing the applications cost not only a lot of time but money. With soo many flavors of PPC Macs out there you really have to test the app on many different models under different conditions. Btw - there was once an interesting article on a Microsoft Blog showing how they do it for the Mac. By making it Intel only there are really much fewer Macs out there.

 

[SPUY767]

Guys - it isn't really about that checkbox. Testing, testing, testing the applications cost not only a lot of time but money. With soo many flavors of PPC Macs out there you really have to test the app on many different models under different conditions. Btw - there was once an interesting article on a Microsoft Blog showing how they do it for the Mac. By making it Intel only there are really much fewer Macs out there.

I know it's not about the check box, I just didn't feel like giving an in depth analysis of programming practice. The elisive check box is made really for small time developers who make small apps like cute games and whatnot. These sorts of applications use little if any CPU specific code. Checking the box in that case is almost superfluous as small apps are going to use things like CI to do their graphics rendering and will inherently be UB because of exclusive use of OS calls for functionality. With most small developers, I'd say that the UB check box does little more that cause the finder to recognize the app as UB in the Get Info window. The check box is more marketing than anything else, and given the number of people citing the check box as the be all end all of computer programming, it appears to have worked.

 

[faustfire]

Neither did the Windows-version - the main reason why I became a macuser. Thanks Adobe!

As for anyone claiming FCP is unstable, I think you seriously need to check your system. FCP is the strongest challenger to Avid while Premiere (mostly because of Adobe's earlier failings) is considered something of a advanced toy by many...

I dont thing many people on this forum have used premire since it went "Premire Pro." Sounds like most used it when it was still using a b editing, not saying it is better than FCP, but it is much better now than it was when Adobe dropped it from the mac platform.

And FCP is very unstable. Granted, if all you are working on is a very simple project is works well, but once you dive into a complicated, long form project, bye bye stability, hello spinning ball of doom.

 

[westonharvey]

Uhh.. Adobe fanboys?

Guys - it isn't really about that checkbox. Testing, testing, testing the applications cost not only a lot of time but money. With soo many flavors of PPC Macs out there you really have to test the app on many different models under different conditions. Btw - there was once an interesting article on a Microsoft Blog showing how they do it for the Mac. By making it Intel only there are really much fewer Macs out there.

All this strange pro-Intel sentiment is ignoring some very obvious questions - especially this one -if it costs so much to test the application on PPC, why is everyone else out there building Universal applications?

If proper methodology is followed, there's no difference in running on either platform. The only testing issues will generally be ones of performance. The analogy is similar to a Java application - you don't fully test the application on every single platform possible, because your platform is the Java VM, not a particular CPU. In this case, since the platform developed against is the OS X system libraries and not the CPU - the bulk of any compatibility problems are going to be Apple's fault, and this is a rare or non-existent situation considering every single system library has been built on Intel from the same source code since 10.0.

I will accept that an application containing a million lines of x86 assembly language code might be too expensive to convert, but that begs the question - who the hell is writing that much assembly code in the 21st century?

Adobe deserves at least an ounce of criticism for this.

 

[skellener]

I agree westonharvey.

....Premiere for Intel-based Macs.....

This begs the question...why only Intel? Supposedly Apple's tools offer a compile for both PPC AND Intel. So to me this mean that Adobe still refuses to embrace Apple's Cocoa development tools.

What do you think?

 

[nagromme]

Great news. More competition--plus, I have many fond memories of Premiere from the 90s!

 

[Peace]

The reason for Intel only is because Rosetta is going bye-bye soon.

Look at Amazon's presale of iLife 07..
Notice the platform stated :

Mac OS X Intel, Mac OS X

 

[SPUY767]

All this strange pro-Intel sentiment is ignoring some very obvious questions - especially this one -if it costs so much to test the application on PPC, why is everyone else out there building Universal applications?

If proper methodology is followed, there's no difference in running on either platform. The only testing issues will generally be ones of performance. The analogy is similar to a Java application - you don't fully test the application on every single platform possible, because your platform is the Java VM, not a particular CPU. In this case, since the platform developed against is the OS X system libraries and not the CPU - the bulk of any compatibility problems are going to be Apple's fault, and this is a rare or non-existent situation considering every single system library has been built on Intel from the same source code since 10.0.

I will accept that an application containing a million lines of x86 assembly language code might be too expensive to convert, but that begs the question - who the hell is writing that much assembly code in the 21st century?

Adobe deserves at least an ounce of criticism for this.

One: Java VM is not analogous to writing codeon multiple platforms. Java IS the platform. It's designed to be emulated identically on every platform that the VM is run on.

Two: A hell of a lot of people are still writing assemnbly code as it is still the single fastest way to write extremely processor intensive code on any machine. Rendering, real time simulations, anything that you want to run as quickly as possible, you write it in assembly.

 

[tk421]

premiere was the first NLE i ever cut on...i absolutely love it, though i've used final cut pro exclusively since i switched to mac. this is great news!

Me too. I loved Premiere when I was just starting. That was before Premiere Pro and it was on a PowerMac 8600 or something (I don't think it was a G3 yet). Since then I've moved on to FCP and Avid.

 

[SPUY767]

I agree westonharvey.



This begs the question...why only Intel? Supposedly Apple's tools offer a compile for both PPC AND Intel. So to me this mean that Adobe still refuses to embrace Apple's Cocoa development tools.

What do you think?

It is quite likely that they are not using Apple's developer tools. Adobe is developing a Cross Platform application, not just an application that is designed to run on multiple CPU types under the same environment a la Universal Binary. Adobe has to use a windows friendly IDE and compiler in order to maintain parity between Mac and Win versions of the programs and to keep from having to have two entirely seperate development groups running simultaneously as they did in the past. You wonder why premiere of old sucked so much, it was because the group at Adobe developing the Mac version was a tenth the size of the group developing the Win version.

 

[jettredmont]

I dont thing many people on this forum have used premire since it went "Premire Pro." Sounds like most used it when it was still using a b editing, not saying it is better than FCP, but it is much better now than it was when Adobe dropped it from the mac platform.

And FCP is very unstable. Granted, if all you are working on is a very simple project is works well, but once you dive into a complicated, long form project, bye bye stability, hello spinning ball of doom.

Okay, I haven't used Premiere in a good long time, since I think it was 6.5 on Windows (tried the demo of 7.0, found it even less stable than 6.5, and decided to jump the ship before it was completely submerged). After having bought the app and two upgrades, I got completely fed up by its instability and the sheer amount of effort needed to get what I wanted (granted, had I invested in Premiere training I probably would have been able to use it far more efficiently).

I'm coming at this from a home user, definitely not pro level. FCP is a really nice system for me, has never crashed on me, and was easy enough to get up and running full speed (to the point that six months after switching over to it I was operating far more efficiently than I had been with Premiere). I'm obviously not taxing it as much as you are, although I generally use two video tracks and a dozen or more audio track pairs. Still, hearing pros (ie, people who pay for their FCP Studio upgrade in a weekend or less of work) talk about editing on FCP for "smaller" projects, it doesn't seem like they're running into stability problems either. Are you sure FCP is to blame, and not something else in your setup?


Also, a question: you say Premiere is not an A/B editing system? I'm confused. I always thought the "A/B" term was roughly synonymous with non-linear editing allowing for multiple tracks, and so far as I can tell Premiere Pro is pretty much the same as FCP in that regard. Can you point me to a good resource discussing this? Wikipedia doesn't seem to recognize the term at all.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I wonder what the revenue percentage that tiny Mac marketshare produces for Adobe with their other products. 5% marketshare != 5% revenue.

 

[72930]

I wonder what the revenue percentage that tiny Mac marketshare produces for Adobe with their other products. 5% marketshare != 5% revenue.

Not true - the percentage of graphics people who use macs is higher than 5%, by quite a long way.

 

[jholzner]

The reason for Intel only is because Rosetta is going bye-bye soon.

Look at Amazon's presale of iLife 07..
Notice the platform stated :

Mac OS X Intel, Mac OS X

Rosetta has NOTHING to do with Universal binaries. If Apple killed Rosetta tomorrow and it was removed from ALL machines in some magical fashion, ALL UB's would still run perfectly. Rosetta is for PPC Apps that have NOT been written as a UB. I don't care either way, to be honest. Just trying to clear up some of the FUD flying around this issue.

Also, Amazon doesn't know Jack about iLife 07. It's just a place holder. They have no more an idea about it than I do.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

One: Java VM is not analogous to writing codeon multiple platforms. Java IS the platform. It's designed to be emulated identically on every platform that the VM is run on.

Two: A hell of a lot of people are still writing assemnbly code as it is still the single fastest way to write extremely processor intensive code on any machine. Rendering, real time simulations, anything that you want to run as quickly as possible, you write it in assembly.

Thanks for the clarification !

 

[westonharvey]

Java et al

One: Java VM is not analogous to writing codeon multiple platforms. Java IS the platform. It's designed to be emulated identically on every platform that the VM is run on.

Two: A hell of a lot of people are still writing assemnbly code as it is still the single fastest way to write extremely processor intensive code on any machine. Rendering, real time simulations, anything that you want to run as quickly as possible, you write it in assembly.

My point was that you are abstracted away from the platform, using shared libraries and APIs identical across target platforms, not that a UB runs in a virtual machine. I know that the NSString class behaves the same on 10.4.8 Intel as it does on 10.4.8 PPC - I don't have to question it.

I'm willing to accept that this particular application has too much assembly to make porting practical. However, on a general note, this may be bad design. Critical optimizations written in assembler should be small, and thus trivial to port. Plus, the original specification should be prototyped in a high-level language - meaning, you should be able to use the high level implementation on another platform - at the expense of some performance, of course. This is a basic tenet of cross platform design methodology. And even when a only single platform is intended, it makes things easier to read and maintain if you have a high level prototype to fall back on.

Another minor point is that if developers write huge monolithic sections of assembler code, instead of using efficient chunks of it to optimize, they're almost certainly writing slower code, as well as creating a maintenance nightmare. It is difficult these days for a human being to outsmart a modern compiler.

 

[zioxide]

blah.


I'll stick with final cut. Premiere is/was overrated, Final Cut is much easier to use.

 

[faustfire]

Okay, I haven't used Premiere in a good long time, since I think it was 6.5 on Windows (tried the demo of 7.0, found it even less stable than 6.5, and decided to jump the ship before it was completely submerged). After having bought the app and two upgrades, I got completely fed up by its instability and the sheer amount of effort needed to get what I wanted (granted, had I invested in Premiere training I probably would have been able to use it far more efficiently).

I'm coming at this from a home user, definitely not pro level. FCP is a really nice system for me, has never crashed on me, and was easy enough to get up and running full speed (to the point that six months after switching over to it I was operating far more efficiently than I had been with Premiere). I'm obviously not taxing it as much as you are, although I generally use two video tracks and a dozen or more audio track pairs. Still, hearing pros (ie, people who pay for their FCP Studio upgrade in a weekend or less of work) talk about editing on FCP for "smaller" projects, it doesn't seem like they're running into stability problems either. Are you sure FCP is to blame, and not something else in your setup?


Also, a question: you say Premiere is not an A/B editing system? I'm confused. I always thought the "A/B" term was roughly synonymous with non-linear editing allowing for multiple tracks, and so far as I can tell Premiere Pro is pretty much the same as FCP in that regard. Can you point me to a good resource discussing this? Wikipedia doesn't seem to recognize the term at all.

We have FCP running on many different machines at work, and I have it running on a macbook pro and a dual 2.5 g5 at home and FCP is pretty unstable on all of them, so I dont think it is the system.

I'm not sure if I'm using A/B editing in the right way, when I use it I'm referring to the way Premire used to have one track on top, a middle track for transitions, and a third track on the bottom.

 

[islanders]

Lets hope they bring back FrameMaker for OSX as well. There is no other solution.

 

[3CCD]

This is great. FCP is an awesome program right now, and with Premiere it gives other people a chance to enjoy Macs and not be forced over to PC b/c they like programs such as Adobe Premiere. I'm not sure how the two programs stand up one to one since all of my experience has been with FCP and Express but it will be interesting to see how this all works out.

 

[NickFalk]

I dont thing many people on this forum have used premire since it went "Premire Pro." Sounds like most used it when it was still using a b editing, not saying it is better than FCP, but it is much better now than it was when Adobe dropped it from the mac platform.

Fair enough. I was burnt badly by Adobe selling earlier Premiere versions as a "pro" application though. The wound (and my wallet) is still aching. I did initialy think their first "pro" attempt looked promising. Then I learned that nested sequences weren't available until v.2 WTF!? How could they sell a pro-editing-program without nesting sequences. No doubt it has turned into a fairly able program since then, but Adobe have been constantly over-selling Premiere to such an extent I find it hard to give it another go.

And FCP is very unstable. Granted, if all you are working on is a very simple project is works well, but once you dive into a complicated, long form project, bye bye stability, hello spinning ball of doom.

My last project consisted of Animation-codec-files, image-sequences turned into film-clips (from security cameras) mixed with DV-footage and graphic files. Total running time (when cut) 25 minutes.

My aging dual G4 didn't experience any problems, granted I had to wait for it to render overnight at times, but the stability was top notch. FCP has been proven to be a viable alternative to Avid on bigger projects. I recommend Walter Murch's Behind the Seen to anyone interested in details. It tells the story about his endavours when editing "Cold Mountain" with FCP - despite Apple's less than overwhealming support for the idea...