Apple challenges its ISVs with Final Cut

Video software takes Mac maker head-to-head with Macromedia.

Apple is placing itself in direct competition with its leading independent software vendors (ISVs) after the Mac developer began beta testing Final Cut, the video editing and effects package it acquired from Macromedia earlier this year.

Sources close to the product claimed that Final Cut is very similar to Adobe Premier, supporting all leading film and video formats, timecodes and deck controls. It will also compete with a range of other Mac-based effects packages, breaking Apple's tacit agreement not to compete head-to-head with its ISVs.

The upcoming revision of the product has extensive controls for logging and capturing clips, the ability to input and export edit-decision lists and 99 levels of undo, as does Premier. Its audio controls and filters and its support for digital video surpass those of Premier, according to sources, but it lacks three-point editing capability or the ability to preview effects before they are rendered.

Final Cut was first developed by Macromedia and was projected to be a high end, all-encompassing effects software package for Mac OS and Windows NT. Macromedia showed off an early version of the product, which was written by Randy Ubillos - the original designer of Premier - in 1996. But the release of Final Cut was repeatedly delayed during last year.

In May, Apple acquired the product. At the time, analysts believed that would be the end of Final Cut, speculating that Apple was only interested in the product's engineers.

But one analyst said: 'The upshot is, no one knows what Apple is going to do with it.'

Under Macromedia's development, Final Cut would have competed with Avid's MCXpress, but in Apple's revised form, it will rival Premier and software packages from Radius, Media 100, Pinnacle Systems and Descreet Logic - bringing Apple into potential conflict with these important ISVs.

Sujata Ramnarayan, multimedia analyst at Dataquest, said: 'Everyone is trying to push video as a way to sell more PCs but Macs are very conducive to video. This could be Apple's way of entering the market and establishing a position which it would then use to move into the consumer market.'

Apple was unavailable for comment.