A Note on Adobe Premiere Pro

I’m Al. I’m the guy who gets to – along with an amazing group of very talented colleagues and friends – build Premiere Pro. For some obvious and some less obvious reasons, our beloved product has been receiving a lot of attention over recent days. So it feels like a good time to express a few thoughts.

Over the last few years, we’ve been working really hard on our NLE.  Way back in April 2010 we shipped our CS5 version, a natively 64-bit cross-platform application built on the Mercury Playback Engine. It was designed to make the absolute best out of modern computational resources, CPU and GPU optimized to its very core. It was a big and bold move in a crowded NLE market, but we felt we had the right foundations in place to start turning a few heads. And turn a few heads we did.

Last month, we shipped a major update to CS5 in CS5.5. I always talk about CS5.5 as building finesse on the solid foundations of CS5, and that was our aim. We had the engine and the chassis of a race-winning car, and now we needed to make it easier to drive. We did. We focused efforts on smoothing the path for people moving over from other NLEs, or those just trying out a new one. And more heads turned.

Then, last week, Apple shipped Final Cut Pro X. I’m not here to comment on Apple’s intentions or strategy, and I won’t. But I can say this: I’ve read and heard that many editors felt alienated with the release. And I didn’t have to look far to hear the disgruntlement. It’s all over the web. It ate my Twitter feed for two days. It was on Conan. It was actually on Conan.

And as a result, understandably perhaps, even more heads have turned to look at Premiere Pro. It’s a powerful NLE that’s intuitive to existing editors. It can open your Final Cut Pro 7 projects via XML. It supports all of your media natively. It performs beautifully, and it lets you edit the way you’ve learned to, using shortcuts you know and paradigms you’re comfortable with.

But the most important thing I want to say to all the newly turning heads is simply this: Adobe is committed making a modern, powerful, useable, professional NLE. In fact, we’re developing harder and faster than ever before. We will continue updating and improving Premiere Pro with regular, timely releases. We’ll continue striving to improve performance, to offer the best native format support possible, and to make the pure experience of just editing – in the way that you’ve learnt to – as intuitive and creative as possible.

I expect that the more you experiment with Premiere Pro, the more you’ll tell us where you’d like it to go next. There will always be bumps on the learning curve with an application new to you, just as there will be things you didn’t have before and wonder how you lived without. I just want you to know that we’re listening to you, the editors, and we aim to continue building an application that you love and can rely on.

This is going to be fun.

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