Adobe Ultra

~ the goodbye ~

Adobe bought Serious Magic on 19 October 2006 for its video line, and one of the things in that line was a keyer called Ultra. Five months later it shipped as Adobe Ultra, Windows only, inside Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and the Master Collection. That was the only Creative Suite it ever appeared in.

What a keyer does is remove one color from footage and put something else behind it, and the hard case is never the clean one. Anybody can key a properly lit cyclorama in a real studio. Ultra was sold on what Adobe called vector keying, which meant it ran enough image analysis to pull a usable key out of footage that had been lit badly, off whatever background color happened to be there rather than only green or blue. The other half of the pitch was virtual sets, with shadows and reflections that followed the subject, so a person filmed against a sheet in an office could end up standing in a newsroom that did not exist.

Adobe never announced that it was finished. Creative Suite 4 was announced on 23 September 2008 and went on sale on 15 October, and Production Premium CS4 simply did not contain Ultra. CS5 did not either, and no page ever went up to say so. The only public record of the end is which applications the CS4 box listed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what serious magic sold ~

Serious Magic was a small California company with an unusual instinct: it kept building video tools for people who were not video professionals. Visual Communicator replaced the editing timeline with a teleprompter, and DV Rack turned a laptop into a field monitor and recorder. Ultra was the one piece of the catalog aimed at the harder technical end, and it is the piece Adobe kept.

Adobe's own framing of the October 2006 purchase was about extending its video offerings at both ends at once, for professionals and for casual users. Ultra was gone as a product inside two years and survived as a feature, which is the more common outcome for a small company's software after a large one buys it.

~ the keyer that outlived the product ~

The technology kept moving while the application stopped. Visual Communicator 3 picked up Ultra's keying in 2007 and Premiere Elements 7 got it the year after. From 2010 it has sat in Premiere Pro under the name Ultra Key, which is where anyone reading this has most likely used it without knowing whose name that was. The standalone program was only ever the wrapper, and Adobe worked out fairly quickly that nobody wanted a separate application for one operation.

That is also why there was never an obituary. Adobe was not shutting a product down so much as moving a checkbox, and from the inside the keying capability never stopped shipping for a single release.

~ nineteen months ~

The lifespan is the detail worth keeping. Adobe Ultra was purchasable from March 2007 to October 2008, and only as part of two Windows bundles that cost well over a thousand dollars each, which is a distribution model that reaches corporate video departments and almost nobody else. I was a university student in Ankara across those exact months, and green screen work was something I saw on television, done by people with a studio and a budget. The descendants are what I have actually touched, because a keyer inside a menu is free now and a keyer inside a box never was.

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