Wow, what a week. How many of you out there are thinking of switching from FCP to another platform?

If you’ve got the Adobe CS5.5 suite installed on your system and you run an AJA Kona card, then yesterday’s release of the AJA Mac Plug-ins for Adobe CS5.5 Version 9.0.1 might be of interest. I’ve been particularly interested in this update as I’m wanting to give Premiere Pro more of a role in my edit suite and Apple’s FCPX update has accelerated that a bit. We’ve known that AJA as been working on the CS5.5 drivers for a while (some already had the CS5.5 beta drivers) but these are the official ones. It took me a while to find them on AJA’s site, however, since I have a Kona LHe. When you look at the LHe support page the Adobe drivers listed are for CS5. But check the KONA 3 page and you’ll find them there. A read of the Release Notes (pdf link) shows compatibility is listed for KONA 3G, 3, LHi, LHe, LSe and Io Express. I installed them and a small test looks like it’s running fine with good performance for the Mercury Playback Engine with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. Once installed, you get a full set of AJA presets:

If Adobe is really serious about competing in the pro video editing space (and I think they are), they’ll get on their hardware partners like AJA, Matrox and Blackmagic to be as quick supporting Premiere Pro as they have been about supporting Final Cut Pro.