Purchases ReelTime software from SuperMac

SuperMac Technology has agreed to sell its much-touted (and as yet unreleased) ReelTime video editing software to Adobe Systems, signaling significant changes for both companies.

The package had been on the block for six months. Bidders included Microsoft, Aldus and Adobe. Claris was not in the bidding, according to Steve Blank, SuperMac’s vice president of marketing. “It’s unfortunate that Apple’s software arm will be the last one out with digital video QuickTime-based products instead of the first,” he says.

The sale to Adobe, says Blank, is good news for people in the Macintosh business. “Microsoft was a vendor of last resort,” he says. “Video is a while away for Microsoft.”

SuperMac had invested significant time and money developing ReelTime to support its VideoSpigot video capture board, and it had been showing ReelTime at industry conferences and analyst meetings for more than a year.

Blank noted that selling ReelTime was like “trading away a first-round draft choice.” But he feels that by explicitly choosing a buyer such as Adobe, SuperMac will reap more than just financially significant rewards.

Adobe has proven its ability to popularize new classes of software, as evidenced by the success of its Photoshop image manipulation software as well as the industry-standard PostScript page description language.

From print to video. This acquisition is a noteworthy departure for Adobe. The company has a very successful application software business, but, until now, all of Adobe’s products have been focused on communicating information effectively in print. With the purchase of ReelTime, the seminal desktop publishing company has moved into desktop video.

ReelTime, which enables the user to arrange “clips” of video, animation or audio over a time line, was a neat segue into what Adobe sees as the next phase of desktop publishing. It allows for the manipulation of multiple video sources, as well as effects and transitions, automatic thumbnail creation and representation of all video clips in use.

Thus far, Adobe has proven exceptionally adept at acquiring software products, perfecting them, and marketing and supporting them. It will certainly do the kind of job with ReelTime that SuperMac, a hardware company with limited resources and no “critical mass” in the application software business, could not have done.

Sticking with hardware. SuperMac will continue to market the hardware part of its video solution. VideoSpigot is a video capture board that enables the user to digitize video at 15 frames per second and save it to a hard disk, using the JPEG standard for image compression. The video can be stored in a number of standard file formats, including pics and Movie, Apple Computer’s new format for time-based data that is part of its QuickTime extensions to Macintosh system software.

Blank says SuperMac will continue development of Digital Film, its hardware product that captures, digitizes and plays back a full screen of video at 30 frames per second. He says the product will be ready in time for January’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

The ReelTime-VideoSpigot combination is the first iteration of hardware and software products to use QuickTime extensions for creating start-to-finish digital videos on the Macintosh. One insider said the products make QuickTime real — not to mention that they beat the Multimedia PC to the punch with video support on the system level, support that’s not yet available in the Multimedia Windows specification. (In fact, Microsoft just recently added JPEG compression for still images only to Multimedia Windows.)

Planning enhancements. Adobe plans to add minor enhancements to ReelTime before the initial release. It will be working closely with SuperMac to create versions 1.0 and 1.1. Sources say that the specifications for 2.0 will also be worked out between the two companies.

But Adobe will be calling the shots. First, the product’s name will be changed, although the new name is still being cleared through copyright lawyers. Then, programmers will write software connections, or “hooks,” to Photoshop, Adobe’s image manipulation software.

New desktop effects. Thus, ReelTime will be capable of creating special effects in desktop video — the ability to actually alter images, for example — that have been unavailable, to date, in any other desktop motion-image software package. Transparency settings, graphic tools and filters will be available to manipulate the video images. In addition, the transitions in ReelTime, such as zooms and fades, are all modules that, like the filters in Photoshop, can be added by third parties without necessitating a new release of the product.

Tim Myers, ReelTime product manager for Adobe, says that Adobe plans to bring the product “in line with its professional products,” implying significant future enhancements, as well as a higher price tag. (One can at least imagine better integration of PostScript images and text on the screen.) Myers said that Adobe is also waiting to see what Apple changes in QuickTime 2.0 so that they do not duplicate effort.

Adobe and SuperMac will initially bundle ReelTime and VideoSpigot. Pricing, shipping dates and the name are not yet final, and terms of the sale were not released.

No software for SuperMac. The deal officially signals SuperMac’s abandonment of the software market, to which it once devoted an entire division. As recently as the Apple System 7.0 rollout in May, SuperMac Software was actively seeking unpublished applications.

SuperMac has since decided to sell all its individual software products. Remaining to date are PixelPaint and PixelPaint Professional, both of which are currently on the selling block.

Blank feels that the software market is too expensive for SuperMac to participate effectively, and that the company will be better off focusing on hardware peripherals. “Creating version 1.0 of any software is the easy part,” he says. “It is extremely difficult to evangelize a new class of applications and make the product competitive in the new market.”

- David Baron