Adobe Premiere used on big new 10-part Netflix TV series

It was tough ask for Adobe Premiere to tackle the needs of David Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl’ feature film in 2014. In recent months, it has been used on a bigger project: ‘Mindhunter’ – a 10 hour David Fincher exec-produced high-end TV series soon to be available on Netflix.

Instead of a single team working on a two hour film, TV series have multiple director-cinematographer-editor teams working in parallel. In this case the pilot was directed by David Fincher. The way TV works in the US is that the pilot director gets an executive producer credit for the whole series because the decisions they make define the feel of the show from then on. Fincher brought along some of the team who worked on Gone Girl. While they worked on the pilot post production, other teams shot and edited later episodes in the series.

The fact that the production company and the studio were happy for the workflow to be based around Premiere Pro CC is a major step up for Adobe in Hollywood.

The high-end market Adobe is going for is too small to support profitable software development. Even if they sold a subscription to all professional editors in the USA, that would not be enough to pay for the costs in maintaining Adobe Premiere. Its use in high-end TV and features is a marketing message that Adobe must think contributes to people choosing to subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud – even if renters will never edit a Hollywood film or TV show.

What about Final Cut Pro X?

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are happy to use Final Cut Pro X in studio features. They haven’t been able to use Final Cut in the TV shows they have directed. Glenn and John directed the pilot and three other episodes of ‘This is Us’ – a big success for NBC in the US last year. Although directors have much less power in TV than in features, pilot directors do have some power to set standards for the rest of the series. I don’t know why Final Cut wasn’t used on ‘This is Us.’ It could be a lack of enough collaboration features or a lack of enough Final Cut-experienced crew. It may take a while before both of these reasons no longer apply.

Although the 10.3 update for Final Cut Pro X was nearly all about features requested by people who work on high-end production, it seems the majority of the ProApps team time is spent on features for the majority of Final Cut users.

Is the use of Final Cut Pro X in a smattering of Hollywood productions enough to support Apple’s marketing message? Will Apple invest more in Final Cut’s use in Hollywood?

When it comes to the opinions of Hollywood insiders, it seems that Premiere is currently the only viable alternative to Avid Media Composer. Although the ProApps team is very likely to want Final Cut to be the choice people make at all levels of production, will they be able to get the investment they need from the rest of Apple to make that happen? We’ll see in the coming months and years.