From talking with the development staff at NAB the last 4/5 years, they do a lot of beta work. Never talked about in public, but it is done. No way to even know who is in that as they do strict NDA's on that. So ... I know from the guys/gals I've talked with that it's done, no clue as to how big the total program is. Looking at the credits in the 'About ...' thing scroll, they have units I'd never heard of. The people that know don't say diddly.
They also note they have both the largest and most diverse user base of any of the major NLE's, and try to do things that none of the others do. For example, FCP doesn't make any attempt to be usable outside of the native OS for that app, which is quite plainly juiced to work better with the 'in-house' app than anyone else's.
PrPro makes the attempt to utilize more formats/codecs, across both major OS's, with more effects than anyone. Maybe it's too much. At this year's NAB, a lot of aisle-talk was that maybe they should take a more FCP/Avid track and list "we work best with these formats/codecs ... outside that, no guarantees". Then work for best performance/stability within a narrower range of media.
Media types, settings, and sub-types just seem to be exploding. Like ... H.264 long-GOP was 9-15 frames ... then up to 30 ... now, there's even some gear using partial i-frames, with full i-frames as far as 100+ frames apart. RED, Arri, Sony & others keep making new codecs or even formats with nearly every major camera they release.
So, the user discussions were wondering if they aren't biting off too big a chunk these days. Maybe ... just maybe.
And for as 'big' as PrPro is for users, my personal thoughts are that Adobe should up the budget for the engineering staff a fair amount. Of course, telling the staff & attending engineers I think that gets just a wistful smile response. They sure aren't going to say anything.
Last comment ... all of the staffers I've talked with at NAB have been folks that do editing on their own right. Many quite experienced completely outside of their software work. They love editing as a process, and want the users to have a good app to work with. And are pained when it fails.
Now, understand ... they are also mostly seeing things from an engineer's brain. Which is a unique & fascinating tool. My brain's a specialist also, I've learned over the years ... analysis. That's all it wants to do, really. You wouldn't want me designing software as I'd be so into-the-weeds in analysis ... well ... it's different than an engineer's approach, but still ... specialist.
Neil
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