Apple Final Cut Pro vs. Adobe Premiere

IT LOOKS LIKE Adobe is finally fed up with Apple's Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express eroding its Premiere and After Effects sales. Although traditionally the two companies have always been very close, it looks like things are slowly changing.

With the increased number of home, semi-pro and professional applications Apple is offering (or will offer in the coming months), it's positioning itself not only as an OS and hardware supplier, but effectively as a competitor for Adobe itself.

It all started years ago, when Apple released Final Cut Pro and then started bundling iMovie with new copies of OS X and new Macs it sold. That was an area that until then had been traditionally under Adobe's influence.

Then came iPhoto, and I suspect many at Adobe laughed their heads out--admit it, who didn't? But iPhoto 2, released last January during the San Francisco MacWorld Expo, is quite a different story. For one thing it's actually useful and usable! Which is something you just couldn't say about the previous version--short of shamelessly lying, anyway. It works pretty well, it's not exactly snappy--what in OS X is snappy?--but it's very enjoyable, and it's free.

I strongly suspect that iPhoto does not bode well for applications like Photoshop Elements or Photoshop Album, which aren't free and frankly don't possess the same appeal of an iApp introduced on stage during a MacWorld keynote by His Steveness himself. True, these are consumer solutions, and we all know the big money lies elsewhere.

Final Cut Pro is a very complete and very expensive solution, costing almost twice as much as Adobe Premiere. This price difference might have left some breathing air for Premiere, but then came Final Cut Express, less complete than its bigger brother but more importantly $ 250 less expensive than Adobe Premiere. Doesn't it look like a full scale attack in DV-land to you? To me it does, and it's no wonder that Adobe is finally putting some pressure on Apple, hitting them where it hurts the most: hardware performance.

Fortunately for Adobe, Apple doesn't sell any of its DV applications (iMovie, FC Express, FC Pro) for Windows, and strangely enough the PC platform--more specifically Dell Precision Workstations--is where Adobe seems to be leaning, as of lately.

Something very similar to all this happened circa one year ago, when it looked like Discreet would cease development of special effects suite Combustion for the Macintosh platform. Discreet firmly denied those rumors, but the connection between this and a series of special effects-related acquisitions subsequently made by Apple ( Shake, RAYZ and Chalice) was very hard to miss.

It looks clear that Apple is positioning itself as the Microsoft of Digital Audio and Video, anywhere from the home users, to the pro-sumers to the high-end professionals. This clearly marks the end of an era of close collaboration between the two companies, and it probably opens up a new era in which Apple will play a major role in the Digital Video and Audio Editing industries--that is, as soon as it pulls a 64 bit Monster Mac out of its hat.

Stepping on third parties' toes is a dangerous move though, and we just have to hope that Adobe won't retaliate by crippling or delaying future versions of Photoshop. But this would equal to committing suicide, of course. The only way for Adobe to get out of this very uncomfortable corner would be to come out with a much improved version of Premiere, something that could strike back at Final Cut Pro/Express.

Competition--isn't it lovely? µ

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