Adobe OnLocation

~ the eulogy ~

The problem OnLocation solved was that a DV camera's viewfinder lied to you. It was small and not color-accurate, and it could not tell you whether the highlights were already clipped. Broadcast crews answered this with a cart full of equipment. Serious Magic answered it with a laptop on a FireWire cable, running software that turned the screen into a waveform monitor, a vectorscope, a set of audio meters and a recorder writing straight to disk. The product was called DV Rack, the name being the joke: the rack of gear, in a bag.

Adobe bought Serious Magic on 19 October 2006 for its video line and shipped DV Rack as Adobe OnLocation CS3 the following July, Windows only, inside Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and the Master Collection. CS4 in October 2008 was the good version: a rebuilt interface and a native Mac build, so you no longer needed Boot Camp to run Adobe software on an Apple laptop. CS5 followed in 2010 and CS5.5 in 2011, which was the last one.

Then the hardware moved. Tape went away and cameras started recording to cards in formats an editor could open directly, which removed the two things OnLocation was for at the same time: you no longer needed a computer present to capture, and you no longer needed one to avoid a bad take surviving to the edit. Adobe's end-of-life FAQ says this outright, that development was being discontinued because of the industry's move toward tapeless, native workflows.

End of life was effective 23 April 2012. Two weeks after that, on 7 May, Adobe Prelude CS6 took the slot OnLocation had held in Production Premium and the Master Collection, and in the new thing called Creative Cloud. Adobe was unusually careful in the FAQ to say that Prelude was not a direct replacement, which was accurate. Prelude logged and ingested footage that already existed. It did not stand next to the camera.

~ the dossier ~

~ the card you put in the shot ~

The feature worth remembering is SureShot, and it worked in a way software features rarely do: it required a physical object. You put a set of printed calibration cards in frame, pointed the camera at them, and OnLocation analyzed only that region, collapsing what three separate scopes reported into a single readable meter. The scopes were there for people who could read scopes. SureShot was for everybody else, and it is the part of the program that most clearly came from a company whose instinct was always to build professional video tools for people who were not professionals.

The rest of the device list reads like a hardware catalog, because that is what it was replacing: a DV quality monitor that logged dropped frames, an RGB waveform, an audio spectrum analyzer, an eyedropper called Spectra 60, a still store called DV Grabber, a shot clock. All of it on a laptop that cost less than any single one of those boxes.

~ never sold on its own ~

OnLocation was not available separately. The FAQ states it plainly: it came as part of Premiere Pro CS5.5, Production Premium and the Master Collection, and the upgrade path offered to its users was an upgrade to one of those. So the entire population of this program consisted of people who had bought something much larger and found it in the folder.

That is also why I have never touched it. The bundles it lived inside cost well over a thousand dollars, aimed at video departments and production companies, and I was an engineering student and then an engineer in Ankara through its whole lifespan. Camera telemetry on a second screen is a thing I have only ever seen other people set up, and by the time I could have been curious about it, phones were shooting video that needed none of this.

~ the whole lineage is in the ground ~

DV Rack became OnLocation in 2007, OnLocation became Prelude in 2012, and Prelude is dead too: Adobe announced its end on 10 August 2021, pulled it from the product pages on 8 September 2021, and supported it until 8 September 2024. What survives of any of it is a workspace preset and an ingest panel inside Premiere Pro.

Serious Magic made four products and Adobe buried all of them. Visual Communicator, Ultra, Vlog It and DV Rack each became an Adobe product with an Adobe name, and each was gone inside five years, with the useful parts moved into Premiere. For a 2006 acquisition that was mostly about talent and technology rather than brands, that is a normal outcome. It is still four names on the same stone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »