Automatic Duck Plug-ins for free as company goes under Adobe’s brand

Pro Export for FCP now available for free on their web siteAutomatic Duck products have been those classic ‘get you out of jail’ plug-ins that were designed for those professionals in the real world who had to translate between FCP X , FCP to Avid or Avid to FCP for example. They were the only plug-in that even allowed OMF Export from FCP X.

Now the owners have been bought by Adobe and are making their plug-ins freely available for what might be a limited time. at  http://www.automaticduck.com/products/pefcp/index.html

The original founders of the software Wes and Harry Plate explained their thinking behind this generous gesture with a letter on their site:

As many of you know I used to be a professional Avid editor, often working between Media Composer and After Effects before the cool kids were doing it. By 1999 I had grown tired of the tedious timeline rebuilding process and started to investigate with Harry Plate (my Dad) how we could make a solution to import Avid OMF files into Adobe After Effects.

Harry and I started working diligently on what became Automatic Duck in late 2000 and by NAB 2001 we had our first product. Before we knew it we were celebrating 10 years of enabling integrated workflows.

Over the years we’ve enjoyed improving the interchange between Avid, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Pro Tools, Smoke, Quantel and other AAF and OMF-friendly apps. We have enjoyed helping users improve their workflows and finish their productions more easily, and we’ve even enjoyed working with users to fix the occasional challenging bug and odd misbehavior. Not to mention at every trade show we had a great time meeting our many users from around the world.

We are very proud of the company we created and the products we lovingly crafted. But after 10 1/2 years the time has come for us to embark on new challenges and begin a new chapter in our lives. To that end Automatic Duck has partnered with Adobe Systems and will be working towards some excellent technology integration. I have joined Adobe as a full-time employee and Harry will be focusing on the technology integration as well as supporting other Automatic Duck partners.

Because we are so busy with these new projects we cannot provide the same level of support for our plug-ins that we used to, therefore we can’t in good conscience charge money for them. But we don’t want our popular tools to go unused if they are still useful to people. Therefore we have decided to make them available at no charge. Enjoy!

Thank you for the memories, we’ll see you around.

– Wes Plate & Harry Plate, co-founders of Automatic Duck