Adobe drops prices for FCP owners by 50%

Adobe made a huge move today to capture disgruntled Final Cut Pro users who have been disheartened by the missing features in FCPX: Any Final Cut Pro or Avid OSX Media Composer owner can "sidegrade" to Premiere Pro or Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium and save 50% off the full or upgrade price. The deal is only good for the Mac OSX versions of the Adobe software. However, any current owner of a Mac version of Premiere Pro or Creative Suite can also take advantage of the deal.

I give the company a lot of credit for making this offer, and I suspect that a lot of FCP and Avid users will take advantage of it. Of course, those people who purchased a slightly discounted upgrade to CS5.5 from resellers over the last few weeks may not be happy that they didn't wait for Adobe, and they may want to go back to their resellers to request a refund of the difference.

The sidegrade deal is available direct from Adobe through September 30, 2011. Even non-owners of Creative Suite (or people like me, who run CS on a Windows system, plus FCP on OSX) can get CS5.5 Production Premium for OSX for well under $1,000; those who qualify for upgrade packages will pay much less. It's an offer well worth considering, in that Production Premium also includes After Effects, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator and Audition.

Adobe's CS5 Launch: They didn't remove the iPhone reference

Adobe launched Creative Suite 5 this morning, and they left in the reference to their Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler in their presentation on Flash, even stating that applications built with it would be accepted in the iTunes App Store. As you probably know, as of last week, Apple won't accept cross-compiled applications into the App Store. Adobe should have pulled the reference from their announcement, but they prerecorded the presentations some time ago and would have had to reshoot or re-edit the Flash segment over the weekend, and chose not to do so. In any event, there was no "miracle" agreement between Apple and Adobe over the weekend, and applications built using the Flash cross-compiler won't be accepted by Apple.

As for the announcement itself, it went much faster and was much smoother than the CS4 launch presentation. The downside is that the presenters were required to talk at high speed in order to present the new features of their products in the limited time available. It also seems to me (although I could be wrong) that the CS5 bundles are significantly more expensive than the CS4 or previous versions, both in full and upgrade pricing. CS4 wasn't a wildly successful upgrade to CS3, and we're still feeling the effects of the recession. CS5 adoption may be a lot slower than Adobe would like.