Apple Offers Discounts to Adobe Premiere Users

JHromadka writes "Apple is responding to Adobe dropping future Premiere releases with great deals on Final Cut products. You can trade in Premiere for a free copy of FC Express, or $500 off FC Pro."

Re:us only

[Mister Black]

US only? From the Final Cut promotion [apple.com] page:

"This offer is available worldwide, except where prohibited or otherwise restricted by law"

DVD Studio Pro?

[ZxCv]

Final Cut doesn't do any DVD burning (that I'm aware of, anyway)--that is what DVD Studio Pro is for. So if what you want can be done, it will probably be done with DVD Studio Pro.

The Fine Print

[bats]

If you look at the mail in form, there's fine print at the bottom. The 'Trade In, Trade Up' deal where you mail in your Premiere CD for a free Final Cut Express disk does not mention Academic versions at all -- just the Premiere LE.

Only the 'Your Checks in the Mail' offer mentions Academic software. Sounds like you can't buy FC Pro Academic ($500) and get the $500 rebate. But it seems that you can trade your Academic Premeire disk for FC Express for free!

I'm licking my stamps now!

Re:Express or Pro?

[capmilk]

With Premiere you can directly record analog video, Final Cut Express only lets you record from digital sources. Apart from that, FCE seems fine for my purposes.
If anyone could recommend a good recording application, I'd be really glad.

Re:Go Apple

[daviddennis]

There's only one catch to your argument: Unlike Photoshop and After Effects, Premiere was hopelessly bad compared to Final Cut Pro.

Premiere's creators were interviewed at Digital Video Editing.com [digitalvideoediting.com]. I can't link easily to the article since DVE is using frames heavily, but go to the page and read part 1 of the interview. They use corpspeak and evasiveness where they can, but there's no question they were very much aware that Premiere was horribly inferior to Final Cut, in feature set, user interface and pretty much everything else.

The situation with Photoshop and After Effects could not be any more different. Both are applications beloved by their users, that have received quality updates. As a result, sales are split about 30/70 Mac/PC, instead of Premiere's 10/90 Mac/PC. Because of this, it's profitable for Adobe to produce a Mac version of these programs, especially with the new G5 offering the needed processor oomph.

In short, I would not call Apple's purchase of Final Cut betraying Adobe. I would consider it Apple's acknowledgement that they needed a high-quality video editing program, and Premiere wasn't going to do the job.

I really don't think Adobe is going to get rid of Photoshop or After Effects for the Mac, because we tend to be a pretty free-spending market. Isn't it interesting that Macs have something like 5% of the market, but 30% of Adobe sales. That's a nice contribution indeed, that can't be written off lightly.

D

Re:Express or Pro?

[Anonymous Coward]

You say the number of layers you can use makes Premiere superior?
FCP supports unlimited layers with nesting, while Premiere is limited to 99 layers last I checked. (although there's no reason for anyone who has a clue what they're doing to be troubbled by that limit)

FCP is much more suitable for professional video work than Premiere ever was, hell it's even creeping into the low end of Avid's territory.

Premiere vs Final Cut Express

[daviddennis]

The most important thing is that Final Cut is a much better designed application. There are about 50 different ways to do anything, it's extremely flexible, and the keyboard shortcuts make it easy to get work done.

As I remember, Premiere has better titling, but Final Cut has an extensive colour correction system that I believe is included in FCE.

But the most important thing is simply a far superior design and user interface, something even Premiere's defender (see his message) will admit.

Hope that helps.

D

Re:Express or Pro?

[bursch-X]

With Premiere you can only record analog video if you have a card that will give you the video inputs.

There are cheap converter boxes that convert FireWire to and from S-Video and "normal" consumer equipment video connectors (whatever those are called in English). They work very well, and usually also work with iMovie.

Re:Premiere vs Final Cut Express

[bursch-X]

Since FCP 4 with livetype. FCP even rules in titling. ;-)