Adobe’s Knockout Punch

When an opportunity comes knocking at the door, make sure you are there to answer it.

Trends, taste and whole industries shift– sometimes, seemingly overnight, and more so if you're not paying attention. When change comes, will you or your organization be ready to jump the curve? If not, you might find yourself outdated and out of business if you're not prepared.

Adobe was, and I think we can learn something from how they were able to adapt.

Seismic changes often begin inconspicuously, and in this case began with the release of the Canon 5d Mk II camera- the first, full sized (35mm) sensor in a prosumer camera that was capable of recording video. It was a last minute add-on that Canon decided to include as they shipped their camera. To their surprise, videographers quickly adopted the camera because of the beautiful images it captured. This created a massive ripple effect down the post production pipeline. A wave of file based video was being generated and someone needed to edit this footage. Enter Adobe.

Well known in the creative circle as the de facto standard with applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design and After Effects, Adobe was not content with letting Premiere be overlooked by editors. But editors and the people and company that support them don't migrate easily because of the investment in hardware and infrastructure that's tied to particular system. Plus, editors want to edit not learn new software. Getting them to change would require a little luck, and luck would have it, change was coming.

Premiere Pro was considered a toy within video editing software world with heavy weights Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro and to a lesser extent Sony Vegas. Avid and Apple had dominated the market for many years and considered the industry standard. So the engineers and developers at Adobe worked silently on the application and bided their time until...

An opportunity presented itself. It was during Apple's push to make more consumer friendly software by releasing Final Cut X in 2011. By radically altering the interface and workflow for more of a file based workflow, they alienated all the professionals who had previously given up their Avid editing software. This was a big gamble on Apple's part– go for the masses and give up on the pros. I'm pretty sure they were aware of what they were doing or it could have just been plain arrogance on their part. The business strategy of going wide versus narrow probably looked like a good idea at the time. 

A collective face palm could be heard by editors all around the world. This caused mass migration to occur and left a bad taste in the mouths of Apple loyalists (myself included). They abandoned the pros and the early adopters. That year, I imagine that there were few shows and movies cut on Final Cut X.

Since Adobe had been working on a ground up reboot of Premiere Pro, their timing couldn't have been better. They release a brand spanking new version of Premiere, optimized the code and wrote the software to take advantage of speedy GPUs. They got rid of most of the "hobbyist" style interface and transitions and positioned Premiere as the 11th hour hero for editors who were burned by Apple. Brilliant!

They offered us something we didn't have before– the end of transcoding. For those that aren't familiar, all editing platforms at that time required media to be transcoded to a more editing friendly codec. For Media Composer, it was Avid's proprietary DNxHD and for Apple it was ProRes. The reason this was necessary was because camera manufacturers needed a very efficient compression algorithm in order to record HD files on very small cameras. They were able to do so because of software and onboard encoding/decoding hardware built in their cameras. This created an incredibly small file but was a drain on any machine that didn't have the necessary video decoding hardware.

Because Adobe had rewritten their code, they relied on the GPU to do the heavy lifting. This meant that you could shoot on any camera and edit in full HD and even 4k without first having to unwrap video files and make an intermediate file before you can edit. A common workflow was to have an assistant editor spend a day converting all the files to a native codec. This created a few problems. It was inefficient and slowed down the editing process. Secondly, it took a very small file and blew it up to 20x the file size depending on the quality of the compression and would be a second generation file. A few generations later and that pristine and beautiful video you shot becomes a blotchy and artifact filled mess. Lastly, you had to manage a master (the file the camera recorded), a safety (clone of the master) and a sub-master (the transcoded intermediary file). Just more data to wrangle and track.

Smaller shops like ours were able to shoot, pop the memory card out and start editing almost immediately. With a wave of their engineering wand, Adobe made transcoding a thing of the past and I couldn't be happier. It was a big enough gain for us that we were willing to give Premiere a shot before considering going back to Avid (the system that I learned to edit on).

Believe it or not, this wasn't the KO punch that I was referring to. But wait, there's more. Adobe also introduced a concept called "round tripping" where a file that you start with in Premiere could be sent to After Effects for more robust animation or visual effects work and then be sent back to Premiere– without rendering of any media files. Genius! This has changed our entire workflow and is more natural to how we work. Start big and block out an idea with stills, type and video clips. Make quick adjustments to pacing, sound and music to get feedback from you clients. Then jump into After Effects and work on finessing once you lock and edit. Client changed their mind about something? No problem. Jump back into Premiere and swap out the shot. No need to send it back to an editor to find the shot. What a time-saver. It's also extremely empowering to be able to work on the entire post process and not to have to rely on someone else.

There's still more. Shoot an interview with loud ambient noise. Send the audio to Sound Booth and within a few clicks, the buzz or hum is gone. It truly feels magical. If you work in production or post, there's never enough time or money for a project. That's why I can truly appreciate tools that help me to tell a story and make everyone look good in the process.

Did you hear that sound? Change is coming and opportunity is knocking. Are you ready to answer?

____________________
Chris Do
Chief Strategist/Founder Blind
Cofounder The Skool