History

Randy Ubillos created the first three versions of the first popular digital video editing application, Adobe Premiere [2], before being given a team. Before version 5 was released, Randy's group was hired away by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video-editing program based on Apple QuickTime. Macromedia could not release the product without causing its partner Truevision some issues with Microsoft, as KeyGrip was in-part based on technology licensed from Microsoft to Truevision and then in turn to Macromedia. The terms of the IP licensing deal stated that it was not to be used in conjunction with QuickTime. Thus, Macromedia was forced to keep the product off the market until a solution could be found. At the same time, the company decided to focus more on applications that would support the web, so they sought to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip; which, by this time (1998) was renamed as Final Cut.

Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration, both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. *1 When no purchaser could be found, Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro. ProMax was the first vendor to demo FCP on the show floor. Apple had only a small booth nearby when compared to their NAB booth in 2006. An interesting note is that both Apple and Avid choose to not have booths at NAB in 2008.

With the introduction of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere's market share remained strong on Windows but began to decline on the Mac,[3] since its older codebase was more difficult to maintain and enhance. In 2003, Apple announced a program for Premiere users to trade in their discs for a free copy of Final Cut Express or a $500 discount on Final Cut Pro [4]. Later that year, Adobe introduced the successor to Premiere, Premiere Pro, a Windows-only product with a modern codebase.

FCP benefited tremendously from the relative maturity and stability of QuickTime together with the new FireWire technology as it was applied to video editing. Sony started the DV/FireWire ball rolling with the VX-1000 video camera as it was the first to have 1394/FireWire ports. Panasonic and Canon then built their DV25 cameras. ProMax (Brad Pillow) made and sold PCI cards that added FireWire to a Mac, but Apple soon had FireWire (IEEE-1394) ports on every Mac. FireWire now handles HD and higher resolutions, but they are still in a compressed format - as DV was to SD resolutions.