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BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 5 POST APRIL 2017 25 YEARS OF ADOBE PREMIERE PRO SAN JOSE, CA — Ever hear of SuperMac? How about ReelTime? And Video Spigot? You may not know these names, but if you're a video editor, you owe your career to these hallowed (if not outdated) monikers. This year marks 25 years since Adobe launched its Premiere nonlinear editing software. Now known as Premiere Pro, it has had a long and somewhat sordid history, transitioning from a mediocre video editor in the 1990s to a market lead- er in 2017. SuperMac was a Silicon Valley tech company that developed an inno- vative Mac accessory called Video Spigot. Video Spigot was a $500 add- on card for Mac computers that al- lowed anyone to ingest video content. Paying such a steep price for a simple device like that sounds ludicrous in 2017, but in 1991, the potential of such an offering was a big deal. In fact, it was such a big deal that the company sold 50,000 units to consumers within six months. With all these users now able to get video into their computers, SuperMac decided it was a logical next step to create a video editing application to complement Video Spigot. Enter ReelTime. In the same year, Adobe purchased ReelTime soft- ware, eventually renaming it Premiere. Picture the video editing land- scape of the 1990s for a moment. This is the decade of Video Toaster (another fantastic name, I must say), Amiga, Avid Media Composer, Media 100, Hi8, MiniDV and lots of VHS. What do most of these names have in common? With a few exceptions, they were all proprietary, expensive, for-pros- only and hopelessly complex — not meant for the average consumer or hobby- ist to access. Now, that $500 card and a piece of software doesn't sound so crazy, does it? Along with the purchase of ReelTime, Adobe also hired Randy Ubillos, the engineer that developed the software. Ubillos developed Premiere for Adobe by himself for a while, but eventually there was a dedicated team of three-to-four people. When Randy left Adobe, he went to Macromedia, which was subsequently also acquired by Adobe. Finally, he ended up at Apple where a project he worked on at Macromedia became Final Cut Pro. Throughout the '90s, Adobe contin- ued to add features to Premiere, but it lagged behind the competition. While it began life as a Mac-only software, Adobe dropped support for the beleaguered platform for a while, eventually re-launching a Mac version once Apple switched to Intel chips. "With Apple's architectural change for the Mac going from a proprietary PowerPC processor to an open Intel architecture, the in- dustry saw a new resurgence for the Mac and this was a major motivation for bringing Premiere back to the Mac," says Dave Helmly, senior man- ager of professional video at Adobe. The tide really began to turn in Adobe's favor in 2003 when the entirety of Premiere's code was rewritten and the company ap- pended the name to Premiere Pro. The target market was now clearly stated in the name, and the battle for professional and prosumer video editor dollars was just heating up. While Avid hard- ware and soft- ware was out of reach for many editors, Premiere Pro was at least good enough for their needs and most important- ly a whole lot cheaper. Adobe's 1991 bet was beginning to pay dividends. Coincidentally, Apple's Final Cut Pro, their Mac- only competitor, really hit its stride around 2003 also. The battle got so fierce between Adobe and Apple that Apple even offered consumers an inviting deal. Apple would accept Premiere Pro install disks as a trade- in for Final Cut Express, or give $500 off the price of Final Cut Pro in exchange. The battle raged for the next several years until the now-infa- mous neglect of FCP followed by the controversial relaunch of FCPX. As a result, 2011 found Adobe welcoming many spurned Final Cut editors into their Creative Suite fold. Two years later, Adobe turned the industry upside-down again with its own controversial move: Creative Cloud. No longer could you purchase creative software outright. Users were required to pay a monthly or annual fee in order to keep using their soft- ware, with the incentive that all up- dates were delivered immediately and infinitely. While some users reluctantly got on board with this new method of using software, the subscription model has proven to be a trend not going away soon. So here's to goofy names like Video Spigot that allowed all of us to move video from tape to disk. Here's to big Silicon Valley acquisitions and competitions that have conceived some of the greatest tools of our trade. And here's to you, Adobe Premiere Pro. Happy birthday! Thanks for making our jobs possible and easier with each update. I can't wait to see what the next 25 years brings. — By Paul Schmutzler