DMN Interview, Part 2: Premiere Pro Premieres
Page 4 of 5
DMN: Speaking of numbers, what percentage of users in the video editing space -- that includes prosumer and pro -- are using Macs and what percentage are using PCs?
Townhill: That's also a difficult question to answer.
DMN: Does Adobe have any specific figures?
Townhill: We don't have any specific figures because it's hard to quantify. If you try to do any market research on this, what happens is, the video editing market is not very well defined. The reason why I say that is, we're locked into the same category as Avid, and for example, Ulead. So that means that if you take a look at that business, then Avid systems range from many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Ulead systems range from fifty bucks.
DMN: Yes, then would you be talking compositing, too? Then you'd be dealing with Discreet Inferno.
Townhill: Exactly. It's very, very hard to quantify this marketplace. One of the things we try and do is we say, OK, if we define the market as, let's say three hundred bucks to three thousand bucks, which is a fairly realistic mix, then let's just say that about 60% or more of those customers are already using Premiere. Since we know that the majority of Premiere users are on a PC, then a significant percentage of that marketplace is using a PC. Now bearing in mind as well, that things like Ulead Media Studio Pro is all-PC, [Pinnacle] Edition is all-PC -- it's a fairly heavily PC-focused marketplace. Again, it's very hard to give you any hard numbers on that, simply because if you talk to any of the analysts or research companies, [they'll tell you] the market is not very well quantified. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
DMN: It looks to me like Premiere Pro is really ready to go. There is only about a month and a half before you're going to ship. Are you pleased with the product so far? It looks very stable. We didn't see any crashes at all, all morning, and half the afternoon here.
Townhill: We've worked very hard on that, you know? It is pretty close to being ready. Here we are on July 8th, we're 24 hours after our announce, so, yeah, thirty to forty-five days later we'll hopefully have product on shelves. I feel very confident we're going to meet our targets, we're going to meet our ship dates. There's some pressure, too, but I also feel that the engineering and QA [Quality Assurance] teams have done a spectacular job. It's funny, because I feel now that the state of the application, even in its Beta stage, is better than previous versions of Premiere have been when they were released.
DMN: I was thinking the same thing. I noticed that.
Townhill: I feel very good about the application. I'm excited about Premiere in a way that I've never been excited about it before. Some of that excitement is generated by the sheer response from the Beta testers, from members of the press that we've shown it to, key accounts that have been disclosed it under NDA [Non-Disclosure Agreement] -- everybody has just been so positive, and I really feel like we have delivered the product that we set out to design two and a half years ago. The design process of software is perpetually a compromise. Sometimes you don't always end up with what you had in mind. But in this case, I think that the entire product team had a common goal, and a common vision, and I really feel like what we've produced now is just a really great, solid, professional-level editing application. I'll also say that it sets our foundation stone, because I think there are many ways in which it can grow. But for the first time in a long time, we now have a really solid base from which to grow. I really can see us taking the Premiere Pro application right now and just continuing to expand upon it, and just delivering continually better and better releases.
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