As first tipped by The Loop late yesterday, Adobe today revealed in a broad press release on its video technologies that its video content creation tools have seen sales increase by 45% on the Mac side this year. Adobe cites switchers from Apple's much-maligned Final Cut Pro X as the primary driver for the growth.
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium software has taken the industry by storm with breakthrough new features and performance that help video professionals deliver content to virtually any screen. Demand for Adobe’s video content creation tools has exploded, growing 22 percent year-over-year with 45 percent growth on the Mac, fueled by the large number of Apple Final Cut Pro customers switching to Adobe Premiere Pro.
Following the poor reception of Final Cut Pro X, Adobe quickly took advantage of the situation to offer significant "switcher" discounts to users moving from either Final Cut Pro or Avid's Media Composer to Adobe's Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Premiere Pro CS5.5 packages. The program, limited to commercial customers, offers 50% of the standard cost of Adobe's applicable products.
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I believe Apple could have avoided this by waiting on the release until it had resolved some of the features it lacked. Or if FCPX was marketed differently and FCP 3 wasn't pulled at the same time.
But that's a dead horse argument, fast forward to now and here is the result. Even if sticking with the classic Final Cut, it's the end of the line for that program and if an editor MUST learn a new program eventually, it's smarter to invest long-term into Adobe or Avid as professionals are their primary market, whereas consumers are for Apple.
Aside from that, Premiere supports many file formats, integrates very well with all your other Adobe apps, is comfortable to switch over to if familiar with Final Cut classic and most of all, CAN import your old Final Cut files (unlike FCPX). It's really a no-brainer move and makes sense why sales are up.
A hobbyist like me can probably switch at the drop of a hat ("Hmm, I didn't like using that one, for my next project I'll switch to the other one") but anyone in a professional capacity -- and anyone working in a group environment -- isn't going to have time or money to waste switching back and forth between platforms. You pick one, you learn it, you stick with it.
Once gone, these people are going to take a LOT of convincing to switch back to FCP.