randyApple's former Chief Architect of Video Applications Randy Ubillos announced on Twitter today that he is retiring after working for 20 years at the Cupertino-based company on professional video and photo software. Ubillos is best known as the creator of the first three versions of Adobe Premiere and KeyGrip, which was sold to Apple and released as Final Cut Pro.

While not a household name like some other Apple employees, Ubillos is well known among those who have used Final Cut Pro or other professional video software. In June 2010, he made a brief appearance on stage during WWDC to demo the latest version of iMovie for iPhone 4 and returned on stage in October 2010 during Apple's "Back to the Mac" event for another demo.

Top Rated Comments

Jamieserg Avatar
103 months ago
and he left us with FCPX?
Which is a fantastic, fast and versatile NLE. When it launched it was lacking features but now it's on par and even superior to the competition in some ways. If you're into your editing you should give it another look if you haven't in a while. It's a different way of editing and has done away from using film analogies, in this digital video world.

I mean each to there own and there's not really a wrong NLE.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
adamjackson Avatar
103 months ago
Randy and his teams have done some really incredible things for video editors around the world. FCP @ $999 was an amazing break through in pricing back when Avid cost 50K+ for an installation. I remember running FCP 3 on a Power Book and thinking....this sort of power on a laptop isn't available anywhere else. iMovie mainstreamed video editing unlike any other product.

The space is full now of cheap video editors but at the time, FCP and iMovie were huge selling points for Macintosh.

I imagine his vested stock options over the last 20 years will leave him with a very good retirement.

AAPL was trading @ $1.50 in 1995 when you factor in splits. It's @ $129 today. I'd say he did pretty well. :)
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
brock2621 Avatar
103 months ago
So can we trash FCP X now and get FCP 7 with 64bit support and multicore support?

Sweet mother no...... please no. I've been using FCP-X editing RED Dragon 6k raw .r3d files straight out of camera on a freaking iMac's without having to render. Truly amazing.

The ability to auto sync audio on import? PluralEyes is required to do that in Premiere and that plugin itself costs as much as FCP-X.

The ability to create a group with a single clip, and then use that 20 times in an edit and changing color on ALL 20 of those clips with a single click is amazing. Also, seamless integration with Davinci Resolve is priceless.

It had a bumpy launch but has bloomed into an amazing and critical piece of software that runs insanely smooth.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Kariya Avatar
103 months ago
Apple bleeding some veteran talent recently. Hopefully the apprentices have been well trained.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
yoak Avatar
103 months ago
I use both premiere and fcx, and fcx is just faster (to edit) when you get the hang of it. The only thing that bugs me is that I can't set the quality of the playback of my RED 6K and 5k like in premiere. Fcx handles it automatically and I often would like less quality on my aging Mac pro for better performance.
I now love things I laughed at in the beginning; Share to Vimeo or YouTube.
I thought that was for holiday videos, but it's great to show client versions this way. All I have to do when finished a version, hit share, it's renderd, coded and uploaded to Vimeo. I'm already sitting in my sofa when an email tells me it's ready to be shared from Vimeo and I can do that from my iPhone
Thanks.

I do understand that other nles might be better suited in a larger collaborate environment, but I'm not in one, is FCX works great for me on a lot of projects
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
LethalWolfe Avatar
103 months ago
GOOD RIDDANCE! This guy destroyed the Apple Pro applications market. He ruined FCP, and overall did nothing to help professional video editors.

Maybe now we can re-claim the pro portion of our apps and hardware for actual pros.

Nothing to help pro video editors? He was one of the original creators of Premiere and then left to create KeyGrip (which was purchased by Apple and became FCP). When people in post talk about the 'three A's' it's Adobe, Apple and Avid and this guy has finger prints all over the NLEs from two of those companies.

With regards to X, Randy was originally working on a video logging app as a companion piece to FCP (kinda like what Prelude is to PPro) and when Jobs saw it he fell in love and said that's what he wants the next FCP to look like, and X was born.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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