Final Cut Pro users may have come to Friday’s eleventh-annual SuperMeet in San Francisco under the Apple banner but they left with a very different identity. SuperMeet co-producers Dan Bérubé and Michael Horton (seen on stage, above) announced that the long-time user group, which has significant and influential chapters in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Boston and Europe, would now be known as the more generic Creative Pro User Group (CPUG). By that night, the slightly shorter acronym had already appended the Boston chapter, Berube’s baby, rebranded as BOSCPUG. Not so for Horton’s 6,000-member LAFCPUG, though an online facelift is likely imminent. As OffHollywood’s Mark Pederson tweeted, that’s “The power of FCPX – creating change.”

The new name, and the wider range of tools and allegiance the name implies, is welcome news to Apple’s competitors, who have frequented and eventually presented at SuperMeets in recent months. Adobe, for example, used the January 27 meeting to unveil an upcoming tool called Prelude, a rough cut application that simplifies ingest by creating proxies at the same time and lets shooters log, annotate, transcode and export footage for an easier transition to editorial.

But the shift from a single focus, which had admittedly widened in recent years to include a fairly broad universe of related technology, won’t give this new guard any special immunity. Adobe and Avid and others under the new Creative Pro umbrella will be just as susceptible to critique from the traditionally vocal SuperMeet attendees, whether it takes the form of a little playful ribbing or the stronger collective criticism users directed at Apple in the past year. Director Jesse Rosten, however, kept the mood light on Friday by showing his now infamous “Fotoshop by Adobé,” a video he posted to the Web earlier this month. While the deft parody puts society’s expectations and not necessarily Adobe in the hot seat, it was a nice way to segue to the user group’s latest chapter.

[Photo originally posted by Doug Luberts on Twitter]