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Movies and NLE marketing
Doesn’t it seem odd that neither Apple nor Adobe have any studio, big-bucks films that they can point to this year as having been cut with either FCPX or Premiere Pro? Seems like a lot of PrPro presence at Sundance, but otherwise, nada. Maybe it’s just a timing thing or maybe everyone has gone back to Media Composer.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
29 Replies
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It doesn’t matter to me if every film this year was cut on Avid, FCPX or Premiere Pro. If a feature film was cut using Premiere Pro and the producers and editors stated that Adobe Anywhere helped speed up the process that would be good for them and their workflow but it may or may not be a reason for others to opt for Premiere Pro. Some may opt for Premiere Pro for it’s integration with AE. Some may opt for FCPX because of the low price of $300.00. I wouldn’t switch editing software based on what Hollywood does. The Adobe CS package worked great for me in 2009. Premiere Pro was considered a joke back then but for people who actually used it it worked great.
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Don’t know of any FCP/x big features, but for 2016 there was Deadpool which should have at the very least taken that last (unused) 10th best picture nomination. It was a fun, engaging, and nicely edited film.
Sundance pics gets picked up, you never know what happens for 2017 releases.
Michael
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The reality is big budget editors and the A.C.E. are behind Avid. At that level, it doesn’t matter what the integration is with AE or other Adobe programs is because editors on studio pictures aren’t doing the compositing and sound mix and color correction, etc. They cut with multiple assistance, lock picture, send selects to VFX and that’s the process. The AEs prep for the OMF or AAF export, VFX etc. Editors just cut.
Warren Eig
O 310-470-0905email: info@babyboompictures.com
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I get the halo effect and all, but the movie biz is numerically small potatos when it comes to an NLEs development and worldwide adoption.
You’re probably going to sell 10,000 seats into just corporate video users for every 1 for a film editor. And probably 1000 seats for general video communicators for every corporate seat.
I’ve come to see that lumbing in capabilities for those top end users is great, because many times those same capabilities end up greatly enhancing the software for the masses.
Roles in X being a good example. I don’t need to do complex turnovers, but I’m starting to use it to isolate timeline sections that I want to treat as as ad hock groups, and it’s excellent to have the tool even if I never use it the same way the movie folks will.
Identify bottlenecks and problems that can be helped/solved – build that capability into the code – then let me adapt it to my specific needs.
Good pathway into the future.
My 2 cents.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “I get the halo effect and all, but the movie biz is numerically small potatos when it comes to an NLEs development and worldwide adoption. “
Avid has a firm lock on Hollywood — maybe over 95%. However there is little money there. Avid’s annual net revenue from video products and solutions has declined each year since at least 2011, and is currently about $201 million, or 66% of what it was in 2011. As recently as last year there were news reports of continuing layoffs. Apple’s revenue from watch bands is probably more than that.
Total Hollywood box office revenue in 2015 was about $38 billion but Youtube is projected (by one analyst) to reach $27 billion by 2020:
https://www.tubefilter.com/2016/04/15/youtube-estimated-revenues-27-billion-2020/It’s great to hear about either Premiere or FCPX used in feature films, and the products benefit from that. However if Apple had not “rescoped” FCPX for the broader market, I’m not sure it would exist today — just not enough revenue in the upper segment to justify the development effort. OTOH Apple (unlike Avid and Adobe) makes a lot from hardware sales and if FCPX is viewed as a Mac sales multiplier, the total revenue benefit is a lot more than the software.
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I know everyone here by and large likes to poo-poo the use of NLE brands in feature film editing. However, it’s important to these companies because of aspirational marketing. No kid in high school or college thinking of going into film and TV or just cutting their own projects, dreams of using that NLE that someone on YouTube decided to cut with. They follow the players and want to be like them. So it might not mean much in direct dollars, but it otherwise has a huge effect. FCP legacy would never have become the force it was without professional, marquee users.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Movie audiences couldn’t care less, what editing system was used to cut a movie. The Hollywood system is quite resistant to change because the producers, expert editors, color correction etc are all very entrenched. When the first talkies came out the studios and theaters resisted, but the audiences flocked to the talkies and then Hollywood changed in a matter of a year or so. My guess it would take something for the big studios to change away from Avid. Of course a big change would be Avid going under, but even then it would probably be propped up.
Maybe a change will come from the small shops that find one or another software is better, cheaper or faster and they can shift far more rapidly than the Hollywood system. Hmm, I wonder what China will be using? The Great Wall movie is coming out this month. https://youtu.be/avF6GHyyk5c
Color grading looks like Michael Bay blockbuster grading.Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
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[Oliver Peters] “FCP legacy would never have become the force it was without professional, marquee users.”
That was true in the late 1990s when editing was a mysterious process done in TV stations and carpeted suites.
But it just hasn’t been that way for decades now.
Video production, even high level production is largly a pretty routine commodity now.
A friend, Don Rumsey cutting on X in Wyoming recently linked me to this public facing piece he worked on.
https://youtu.be/tSf2TV4nrM4Not that long ago, nothing less than a huge corporation could do stuff like this that has what amounts to helicopter shots (now drones) and Hollywood style camera moves throughout. Now it’s pretty commonplace stuff everywhere on the planet from Wyoming to Zimbabwe.
These are the majority of gigs of the future IMO. Not the relative handful of feature films being rolled out yearly. Not if you want to make a realistic living in a world awash in content.
It seems like EVERYBODY understands the basics of using a computer to assemble image streams today. And millions, not thousands, now own and understand the means of production. That’s also why YouTube is what it is, not to mention the juggernot that the “Lets Play” kids have created totally on-line.
They usually could care less about being “moviemaker famous” when their peers are spending vastly more money and time on alternate forms of leisure time stuff. And as Hollywood and the film industry turns more and more to “tent pole” thinking, the opportunities for editorial employment in big scale filmmaking are going to contract, not expand, IMO.
What is going to expand are individuals with a story to tell, looking for video literate people to help them do it. Some in large teams, yes, but many, many, many multiples more in modest or very small groups – and even, often, as solo practitioners.
And there’s a place for them all.
If software “focuses totally on the top” (ala AVID) I think it’s in trouble.
To the extent it focuses on growing from the middle out rather than from the top down, I think it will succeed. And when that means jettisoning the older thinking that things are done one way just because it’s how a legacy class of users expect them to be done, so be it.
I was noticing (on one hand) how much simpler X has become via workspaces when you just want to focus on a specific task – while adding even more possibilities for doing more complex work via things like the expansion of Roles.
Middle out stuff everywhere.
My 2 cents.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
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[Oliver Peters] ” FCP legacy would never have become the force it was without professional, marquee users.”
I think having users who were super passionate (FCP user groups) about the software is what allowed FCP to get some recognition more than anything else. Imagine if there were passionate users of Pinnacle’s Liquid Edition. Apple users could have experienced the thrill of GPU acceleration and background rendering in 2003. Liquid Edition was an interesting program to say the least. I sold my copy when Avid decided to end of life it. Would I be using Pinnacle’s Liquid Edition instead of Premiere Pro if Avid did not to end of life it? Probably but who can say for sure. It took Adobe, Apple and Blackmagic a long time to catch up to Fast/Pinnacle/Avid. Did Fast/Pinnacle/Avid have a patent on GPU acceleration and background rendering? Who knows? Having said that the background rendering of Liquid Edition was needed more back in the days of analogue and digital tape export. As of 2017 I think Media Encoder is a better option than background rendering from the timeline.
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[Oliver Peters] “I know everyone here by and large likes to poo-poo the use of NLE brands in feature film editing. “
Unless they want to crow about it when X is the one being used. ????I say as someone who wrote one such crowing article about X myself. ????
(btw, we haven’t talked about this around here, but what Ficarra, Requa, Fogelman et al are pulling off week after week on This Is Us is beyond cinematic, approaching the realm of the miraculous. I don’t care if they never make another movie again as long as they keep doing this.)
The thread asks about movies, but what about European news organizations? Are stories about the success of X at a European broadcaster irrelevant to everyone who’s not doing news for a European network?
I’m being rhetorical here, at least to the extent that it seems blazingly obvious to me that the answer is OF COURSE these stories matter. I want MORE of them, even though I’ll never do that kind of work in those kinds of places. Aside from my general curiosity about how EVERYONE does EVERYTHING, stories like these ESPECIALLY matter for the people who DON’T need persuading. They, we, need encouragement. Inspiration.
You cheer for your “team”, whether or not you personally are playing the game, because of how it makes you feel about yourself.
That is, to ME anyway, the magic of the Cold Mountain Moment. It wasn’t aspirational in the sense of “someday I hope to be a pro” as much as “someday I hope to be able to stop defending my choice of software as being fully capable of any professional task I set it to, and have it simply accepted as such.” Or even more broadly, a settling in of the community with itself, feeling ratified in making a gamble on a company with no experience whatsoever in this field, buying tools from a company with a genuinely poor track record developing such tools themselves (Macromind MediaMaker, anyone?) who fortunately had brought in a team from yet another company, to find that, a few years and a few more key purchases later, hey, whaddya know? This thing’s a genuine winner.
We’ve all picked enough losers along the way (MACROMIND MEDIAMAKER, ANYONE?) that picking a winner is FUN. The Cold Mountain moment didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know, but it’s still nice to hear.
With all the concomitant benefits that accrue from having professional heavyweights lending THEIR voices to ensuring that the software will be developed in ways that benefit professionals like them, like me, like US. Because even though we’re not doing the same thing, we still have this shared blood bond, that our livelihoods depend on this thing being up to the task.
I’m going to step aside from the bizarre argument that’s about to make my head explode, that only companies bent on failure, if not suicide, would be so foolish as to focus on professional customers long enough to note that we admittedly debated the meaning of the Cold Mountain Moment even at that time — even without a proper debate forum in place!! How did we manage?!?! — but it’s beyond debate that something changed at that point.
I would have hoped that one thing that would have changed by now is that we could let go the fiction that stories like this don’t matter. Stories like this matter, because tool choices matter. They’re not all equally up to every task. Vastly more important than feature sets, not every user’s personality is equally well-adapted to the conceptual models of every development team.
I’m going to go the other way and say that reviews are the things that are damn near useless imo. I don’t care nearly as much about the names and locations of buttons as I do about whether the thing WORKS. That’s why the most useful approach is to hear about the WORK.
Like your old high school physics exams. Any moderately-motivated monkey can punch the buttons to come up with a usable answer. The only way I can know if you know what you’re talking about is if you SHOW YOUR WORK.
Or are people really saying that Ronny Courtens can stop bothering with these epic tales of the workflow warrior-poets building FCPX workflows through sheer force of will? That Oliver never needs to ask another editor or color grader about their software choices?
Of course not. That’s nonsense. I have absolutely no idea why anybody would even pretend that these stories aren’t at least interesting. That part’s opinion, and we can debate it, but as we step into the world of actual facts, rather than merely alternative ones, it’s quite easy to demonstrate how stories like this have moved the needle again and again, and not just in this industry.
On that level, it’s not even marketing. It’s our lives as social animals. We listen to stories about other people to learn about ourselves, to learn about what’s possible for ourselves to do and become. That’s exactly the stuff that you want companies to be doing. At least I do.
Yeah, I’ll glance at bullet pointed lists because I have some specific needs, but really, feature sets are closer to parity than not already. Give me something real. Tell me about the time you saved, the money you made, the pain you salved, the potential you embraced.
Uhm, not YOU, marketing weasel. I was speaking to my peer, the person who pays money to buy their tools, and is trying to build a life with them. THAT’s who I want talking to me. Doesn’t matter that it’s on behalf of some company or other. Rather than having to wade through intentionally anonymized marketing rap and scratch my head over whether this has anything to do with me or not, I can get there more quickly in a bylined article by a writer like Oliver or Ronny who I KNOW is legit, and the subjects of the articles are SHOWING THEIR WORK.
So to me, even though the stories are in the service of marketing, the fact that they’re transparent make them the stuff of life. I like life. I like stuff. I like stories like this.
So there are my questions for you. Is it only film stories that don’t count for anything, or is it broadcast stories too?
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