Timeline Analog 5. John Buck

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      Digital F/X’s Michael Olivier adds:

       No doubt Premiere Version One was a groundbreaking product at the time, but no professional editors in those days would consider using Premiere. It was a “prosumer” offering: great for enthusiasts on a budget but terrible for 500+ cuts a day editing.

      SuperMac VP Laurin Herr looks back:

       Was Premiere like Avid? No. Did it offer the editor the same versatility and creative vocabulary and productivity as an Avid? No. Randy Ubillos is a brilliant programmer, but he wasn't an editor.

       He had created a new working environment based upon the metaphor he knew well and understood, and that was desktop publishing. Quark, Photoshop and Postscript. He took a different approach, a different metaphor that was brilliant.

      Despite the shortcomings for professional editors, Premiere's early adopters were desktop workers, and they loved it. Editor Junior Hansen from the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group was a typical user, amazed at the power that editors now had.

       Premiere 1.0 was a visionary Mac application and remains so, even to this day. I'm sure the first cave woman felt the same about fire, once she was able to harness it for soufflés. I had the opportunity to work with a beta version in the ‘early days’ when the idea of dynamic data was just an exciting secret soon to be told, it was instantly intuitive.

       The metaphors of film and video editing were employed and recognizable within the interface.

      In homage to the days of slicing through film strips and then videotape, Ubillos had included icon design that matched a film editor’s toolset. Hansen Jr concludes:

       Tools and objects are representative of their function; a QuickTime movie looks like a strip of film, a razor blade tools cuts just as it would in the real world.

       EDDY AWARDS

      The potential that Randy Ubillos had unleashed with ReelTime then Premiere was profound and it did not go unnoticed. The 8th MacWorld Editors' Choice Award (Eddy) voting committee decided to make an exception in 1992 and award its Eddy statue in two categories.

      The Lifetime achievement went to Adobe founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock and at the other end of innovation, the Rising Star Award went to Randy Ubillos.

      The focus of software development moved from print publishing to video publishing. MacWorld also recognized one of the key participants in the upcoming revolution.

      Ubillos recalls:

       I was at the reception for the awards and it was the first time that I met (Charles) Geschke and (John) Warnock. Although we were seated at the same table, it was all pretty overwhelming.

      Programmer Nick Schlott recalls reading the Eddy announcement:

       Here’s the thing, they had never awarded the Eddy to a person before, so it was obvious that Randy was a one in a million programmer but there is also the fact that there hasn’t been another individual award since!

       I remember thinking, “That is very cool. He gets an award for being Randy Ubillos.”

      Product manager Tim Myers recalls the next stages for Premiere.

       Randy and I were left to ourselves with ReelTime for quite a while. We had some support people working for us on and off but other than that, two of us! There was little or no expectation on us to be the ‘next big thing’ necessarily but that was how Adobe was back then.

       Nobody expected Photoshop to be as big as it is now, Adobe didn’t even acquire it the first time it was offered to them and so their expectation of ReelTime and Premiere was, I guess the same. If you look back at what was important at the time it was Raster Graphics or Bitmaps. Video was still to come.

       For the senior executives at Adobe it was a nice way to round out the spread of products, but I honestly don’t think they took it as seriously, as say Illustrator.

       AVID VS MONTAGE

      Just like Ediflex, TouchVision and EditDroid before it, Avid’s future depended on film editors. Variety magazine's review opened with:

       Novice writer-director Ron Senkowski offers some mildly amusing evidence that he’s good for a few laughs in “Let’s Kill All the Lawyers”. Small-budget Michigan-filmed effort won’t generate much B.O. coin, but may find a few advocates on home video and cable.

      “Let’s Kill All the Lawyers” became the first feature-length film to be edited using a Macintosh controlled Avid system. Seen here are writer Senkowski, director Christa Kindt, editor and producer Shannon Hamed.