This feature focuses on two other guys, the ones I know the least.
Adobe’s Premiere
Premiere dates as far back in the early 1990s, as the GUI train was at this point accelerating with no stoppage. Premiere developed by SuperMac in 1991, and was acquired by Adobe (the Not Invented or Not Innovated Here is Adobe’s informal tagline.) Trigger warning, I am no fan of Adobe, I find them to be extremely complex, shoplifting the competition and not getting properly accounted in the legal sense (look at the whole brohaha of Photoshop vs. Quantel’s Paintbox in the 90s.) . It’s not to say I use some of their products, because there really isn’t that many other choices. I am not a Creative Cloud customer either.
They made the version for the Mac first, then the PC by 1993. Unlike Avid’s platform which needed a customer to buy the Mac with the Avid hardware and software, the customer for Adobe could find a Mac or PC compatible to the specifications. (This predates the time before the Power PC or the Core Duo, of which basically needed other hardware to do the processing of video, if you use Apple’s FCP as the baseline of simplicity of video processing.
The original Premiere code ended by a decade later, when Adobe introduced Premiere Pro and by 2013, just 22 years after the original marketing of Premiere, Adobe was migrating customers into the cloud with Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform.
From my observation, Adobe is between Avid and whatever operating system Premiere runs on. Dual displays are optional, but not required, and later versions in the CC era, is a clusterfudge of a user interface.
Edius
Currently marketed by the same company that developed the CVG600, that same Grass Valley, markets one my favorite NLEs in a post FCP7 world. However there’s a catch. It runs on Windows only. Edius has a large install at least of the 3 of the 4 Network O&O groups, Fox ABC and NBC, and other major affiliate chains, while all the network news divisions are still using Avid’s Windows-based NewsCutter that is a UI designed for news gathering operations, since the last year Avid has pulled the plug. on the “Media Composer with NewsCutter Option”
Edius was built originally by the Japanese based Canopus in 2003, with GV acquiring them two years later, while Grass Valley themselves have gone through many different owners, with most recently being spun off by the hard-wiring conglomerate Belden in 2018.
What may make Edius be good sell, is that it supported file based media formats, the solid state storage devices like Sony’s XDCAM, Panasonic’s signature P2 and your consumer grade SD cards early on as early as 2006! While for most video pros, file based workflows are common now, at the time Edius was the one of the few that could do it without much hardware or plugins. Thanks to Avid for bringing the world the lovely “plugins” (sarcasm.)
Edius’ media management application that has the resemblance of Apple’s iPhoto. While version 10 (or “X”) came out just last fall, with anything that is “X” I am taking with a grain of salt. The cool thing is the pricing is more competitive, and it does a whole lot of cool things if video is your medium. The Title functionality is in par to a Chyron, Deko or even an Xpression with the UI mimicking a Character Generator.
If graphics is another way you express yourself (and I like to do newsgathering, so this why I am speaking about this with high regards) it’s worth giving Grass Valley your email to try to for 30 days. For my ThinkPad W520 using Windows 7 (shh… don’t tell legal and compliance!) to handle the editing is another sign that you do not need the latest and greatest; since it’s dependent on the CPU, and GPU. Since I have a NVIDIA and an i7, cutting 90 second package can take less than 10 minutes. Again in par with the legacy FCP. I have not tried EDIUS on my Mac via BootCamp; as I am in a pivot point whether or not I should stay on the Macs as a creative pro or move to Windows.
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