Productions for Adobe Premiere Pro
Van Bedient writing for the Adobe Blog:
The new Productions feature set for Premiere Pro was designed from the ground up with input from top filmmakers and Hollywood editorial teams. Early versions of the underlying technology were battle-tested on recent films such as “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Dolemite is My Name.” Special builds of Premiere Pro with Productions are being used now in editorial on films like David Fincher’s “MANK.”
Notice that the approach Adobe is taking is exactly what Adam Lisagor complained about Apple not taking for Final Cut Pro X in 2011:
When Apple pushed FCP to the industry pros five or six years ago, they did some hardcore outreach. They brought out Walter Murch, for God’s sake. The man cut Cold Mountain on it for God’s sake.
Versus Adobe Team Projects
Adobe already has an existing feature for video collaboration called Adobe Team Projects, that’s designed around a cloud workflow, Bedient describes the difference:
Productions is designed for collaborators working on shared local storage. Team Projects is built for remote collaboration: assets can be stored locally with individual users; project files are securely stored in Creative Cloud. The two toolsets are distinct and currently cannot be combined. Productions is part of Premiere Pro and is included with all licenses. Team Projects is part of Team and Enterprise licenses for Premiere Pro and After Effects. In order to support users working from home due to COVID-19, Adobe is making Team Projects available to all users from April 14 through August 17, 2020. See this post for more information.
Collaboration & the Future of Creative Apps
Collaboration is the word of the day, and it’s great to see Adobe taking it seriously, especially with a vision that isn’t web-based. The web is the platform that makes collaboration the most straight-forward, the easiest way to share something is through a URL, but a web app isn’t necessarily the best trade-off for all use cases.
The question at the heart of Figma’s success is whether it winning the user-interface design market means web apps are also destined to win other creative markets which have otherwise been the stalwarts of desktop native apps. But another way of looking at it is that the native app they are competing with, Sketch, was doubly harmed by Apple’s policies:
- It’s built on AppKit, which Apple was aggressively enhancing in the 2000s for high-end desktop apps but since the 2010s they’ve switched to focusing on frameworks that benefit iOS. This essentially means the platform Sketch is built on has spent a decade stagnating.
- As software for professional creative users, Sketch isn’t compatible with the Mac App Store, this means they’ve been denied access to the most important promotion channel for Apple platforms.
Figma may have only been able to succeed because Sketch was built on a platform that’s at best indifferent to their use case, and at worst actively hostile to it. That’s a big difference compared to the cross-platform native desktop apps that are still relevant: Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to make sure Microsoft Office stays relevant, and Adobe will do the same with Adobe Creative Cloud.