Indie film editing: Adobe increasingly popular among Sundance productions

[13:39 wed,5.February 2020 by blip]

Which camera technology was used in the making of the films in this year&s Sundance programme, one of the largest independent film festivals worldwide, has already been discussed elsewhere (Sundance Cameras 2020), but there are also some interesting figures on the editing software used. While the range of cameras is reasonably wide, the editing software used is different -- the available selection of professional software is manageable and, as it seems, Adobe is clearly ahead in the indie sector. More than half (56%) of all submitted productions (film, shorts, VR) were edited with Premiere Pro, according to the manufacturer; the figures are calculated together with Sundance. Last year, the situation was similar, back then it was around 52%, while only 21 films were made with Premiere in 2015, which was more than double the number of films made with Premiere in 2014.

One of the reasons for this continuous strong growth in recent years may have been the introduction of Final Cut Pro X in 2011, as described in detail by

article in CineMontage, the magazine of the American Editing Guild. There were also positive voices, but with the conversion of the software popular in the indie sector (the market share among professional film editors is said to have been

in 2007 it was about 49%) to a completely new operating philosophy, the - at least initially - lack of many professional functions and last but not least the fact that older FCP projects could not be opened,

Apple was then confronting many users with a new operating philosophy. Quite a few remained stubbornly stuck with the last version of Final Cut Pro 7 (such as the currently Oscar-nominated parasite editor Jinmo Yang, who would rather not update his operating system for years than change the software), or looked around for other alternatives.

Obviously Adobe profits from this to a great extent. In a

graphic, NoFilmSchool has broken down the responses of 75 Sundance filmmakers to their software used; this appears to be a survey in its own right and it is unclear to which festival sections the information refers; the figures are therefore not comparable to those quoted by Adobe, and with many more productions running in the Sundance programme, it is unclear how representative they really are. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the further distribution of the programmes used looks like here: of the 75 participants, even 65% stated Adobe Premiere as the software used, 27% Avid and 8% Final Cut Pro.

It&s noticeable that a relatively new editing option, namely Blackmagic&s Resolve, apparently hasn&t yet gained a foothold as such in the upper indie area, although it is already used for grading in about 9 out of 10 movies. From only two movies in the lineup it is known that it was cut with DaVinci Resolve Studio ("The Killing of Two Lovers" by Robert Machoian as well as "This Is Not a Burial, It&s a Resurrection" by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese).

more infos at bei theblog.adobe.com

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