NAB '99 Report 2

Macs Only!'s On-Scene Report 2

National Association of Broadcasters '99

By Mike Downey

April 21, 1999

I've attached some more photos from my tour of the Sands yesterday. Today I will be hitting the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I'll write you this afternoon with a detailed report from the show. I'm now going to focus on third party products and support for Apple.

Here's some interesting info about Final Cut Pro (FCP)... After my FCP demo yesterday I continued to make my way around the floor of the Sands Convention Center and stopped to speak to some reps. from Adobe and Avid. I picked up some interesting "unofficial" info.

I spoke with a gentleman from Adobe to see what he thought about FCP and what effect it would have between Apple and Adobe considering its direct competition with Adobe Premiere. He hadn't seen FCP yet, but when asked about the advantages of using Premiere vs. using FCP, he touted native Adobe application support and a strong market history as the end-user's most significant benefits. An interesting note, however, is that Apple was using several different Adobe applications (ie - Photoshop, After Effects, etc.) when creating their demos and pointed to their (near) flawless compatibility as a selling point.

As I entered the Intel booth I found an Avid rep. showing off Avid's new sub-$10,000 NT specific, turn-key video production machine. I asked him why it seemed that Avid was leaning more towards the NT platform withtheir new products. He agreed that historically Avid users have preferred the Macintosh platform, but also agreed that Avid was starting to focus on the NT platform, due in part to the introduction of Final Cut Pro. He didn't have any "official" reasons why, but speculated that it may be difficult for Avid to get support with technical issues now that Apple has a competitive priority. He said, to the effect, that "If Apple needs to resolve Codec issues, which program do you think they would focus on first?" Again, this was an unofficial opinion - but an interesting one. Apple's product designers were showing off FCP using Avid as their "features-based comparison" - at a much lower price. Of course FCP does not offer some of the high end capabilities of the more expensive Avid programs, such as real-time editing, but for the money it gets very close.

Photographs by Mike Downey

Copyright © 1999 by Bill Fox
All rights reserved--no commercial use permitted without attribution.

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