Half-life of the NLE

Like all craftsmen, editors are passionate about their tools. Follow the forums and the question of the day is: Can Premiere Pro be used for my kind of work? Adobe’s created a lot of buzz with the CS3 announcement, and it is deserved. Adobe’s approach to the standard suite is a little more forward thinking than Apple’s – and light years ahead of Avid’s. The Final Cut Studio, as its name implies, is Final Cut Pro-centric. Not a bad application to build a suite around.

Adobe’s Creative Suites are not so much built around Premier Pro as among it. I like to think of Dynamic Bridge as a neural network of applications, whereas the Final Cut Studio is a hub and spoke system. While there are few direct connections between satellite applications, all paved roads lead to Final Cut Pro. (The metaphor for Avid’s approach is the Chinese restaurant menu – one from column A, one from column B, with no real connectedness.)

The neural approach has several advantages. Most obviously, from a marketing point of view, Premiere Pro lacks the cachet of its siblings Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects among video pros. But more importantly, it’s less dependent on the NLE.

What we’re seeing in today’s environment isn’t that Avid has dropped the ball in NLE development, nor Apple beginning to rest on its laurels. It seems to me that NLEs have a development life of 7 or 8 years. You can add features for about that long before the platform needs a complete overhaul. Premiere Pro is the youngest of the big three platforms. Final Cut is pretty mature and Avid’s more so.

It’s going to be interesting to see when (or if) Cupertino and Tewksbury will make the bold move of committing to a complete code overhaul as Adobe did when it moved from Premiere to Premiere Pro.