Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, iMovie ’08, and Final Cut Pro X
Randy Ubillos (via Stephen Hackett):
I was working for SuperMac and they were working on something called DigitalFilm - one of the very first digital video recording cards. It did quarter frame standard definition - they were pushing the limits of the JPEG chips that were available at the time and we needed some software to try it out. In about 10 weeks I put together a demo and we’d bring in people and show them editing on a computer and it was going over pretty well. The marketing department had just gotten out of software at SuperMac and they weren’t sure what to do with it and so as it got close to shipping the card in late 1991 my software was sold to Adobe and they released it as Premiere 1.0.
[…]
We’d been going for about three years on the [Final Cut Pro] project, we went over to [Apple] and we had more work to do. Apple wanted to re-look at what it looked like. It turned out to be a good thing. We got to a point right before NAB in ’99 we just said “We are going to show this thing at NAB come hell or high water” and we got the nicest present from Avid because that was the NAB they announced they were leaving the Mac.
[…]
iMovie’s codename was RoughCut, it was conceived originally as a front end to Final Cut - for creating a rough edit for Final Cut. I worked with a graphic designer to make it look good. When I did a demo of it to Steve [Jobs] in about three minutes he said “That’s the next iMovie.” So I asked when it was supposed to ship, and he said “Eight months.”
[…]
My idea was that Final Cut 7 should stay exactly as it was for about a year, and every time you bought a copy of X you got a copy of 7. They didn’t want to hear it. I knew 16 months before the launch that I was going to have a bunch of arrows in my back. I was going to be blamed for this big transition. It’s the Apple way of doing things: ‘Feet first, jump in!’
