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Adobe Rent Price Increase
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[Scott Witthaus] “Why should I have to pay for it?”
Not sure why this is an issue for anyone. You don’t have to pay for it. You can pay just for Premiere if you have no need for the other Adobe products or you can use another NLE- FCPX, Resolve or Avid. So what’s the problem?
Windows 10 Pro
i7-5820k CPU
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Adobe CC 2018
Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0
Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280
Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with FreeFileSync -
[Bill Davis] “Ships or rail cars arriving with goods, storage warehouses across regions feeding hub distribution centers – those feeding regional and local DCs – further feeding stores with weekly re-stocks. Vast networks of trucks, drivers, and tens of thousands of workers, just to get the box onto the shelf in your neighborhood – and enable your purchase.
Now it’s one click and $299 gets exchanged for some IP, digitally.”
All good points, though Tim Cook comes from the Just In Time inventory management school so there is minimal stock sitting in warehouses, and compared to monitors, laptops, iMacs, desktops, etc., that Apple is also shipping I can’t imagine copies of FCP Legend really being impactful.
Also, AFAIK, Apple’s never really had a traditional relationship with retail (it’s generally been mail-order, store w/in a store, authorized resellers, or their first party stores) so they might not have the same amount of overhead since they’ve tried to minimize the role of middlemen? Economies of scale come into play too so a massive company like Apple or Electronic Arts is going to be spending less, relatively speaking, on shipping than small company.
For books (link), video games (link), and CDs (link) the costs for physical creation, shipping, etc., are a much lower than 75% price drop from FCP Studio to FCP X that are you largely atributing to the move from physical to download distribution. The CD article is very old article, but the song remains the same (pun intended).
There is also this really great quote from it, “The really big costs of CD’s derive from marketing, promotion, artists’ fees, royalties and, often, an arbitrary markup representing a calculated guess at what the market will bear.” I find the part about the markup fascinating because we diverge from objectivity to subjectivity . “How much did this cost to produce, market, distribute, etc.,” is a much different question than “What’s the most we can convince out target demo to pay for this product regardless of how much it cost use to make it?”
It’s that subjectivity that has helped keep prices for books/ebooks, CDs/downloads, and video games pretty consistent for decades. For example, what a console video game is ‘worth’ today is about $60 (and it’s basically been that way for nearly 15 years). The subjectivity also gives companies the ability to drastically alter prices while still, depending on the business model, keeping the product profitable (or not profitable if it’s being buoyed by another part of the company). I think Apple deciding that an NLE is ‘worth’ $299 and ditching all of the other software that used to be park of the FCP Studio bundle has more to do with X costing what it does than COG savings.
On a related note, since we are people that help create intangible things for a living, I think it’s important to remember (and stress to clients) that the created content is vastly more valuable than the medium that it’s stored/distributed on. And that the most valuable part of the ‘cost’ related to the creation of that content is the human component. “I charge a lot because my gear costs a lot” is a creaky position as technology changes quicker and quicker, where as “I charge a lot because my talent, experience, and knowledge will net you a great ROI” with weather changes much better.
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Of course, the real irony in the FCPX vs CC debate is that, if you poke around inside the FCPX Package Contents, some of the splash screens are Photoshop files. ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Andrew Kimery] “”I charge a lot because my gear costs a lot” is a creaky position as technology changes quicker and quicker, where as “I charge a lot because my talent, experience, and knowledge will net you a great ROI” with weather changes much better.
“I could not possibly agree more with this sentiment.
If you want to make a serious living, never sell your time. Develop and sell your expertise. Period.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “Of course, the real irony in the FCPX vs CC debate is that, if you poke around inside the FCPX Package Contents, some of the splash screens are Photoshop files. ☺”
Well, sure.
But if you similarly poked around in virtually every Adobe product you’d probably uncover video files that were born on Quicktime, text files born on Word, sounds born on ProTools etc, etc.
A lot of this obviously just reflects the state of the industry during the products’ developmental cycle.
To re-do work you already have in hand (that you can legally use in your own product) unnecessarily, is just going to slow down your ability to ship in a timely fashion.
Put another way, outstanding building Architecture doesn’t imply that each and every structural beam connection had to be re-invented for the building itself to be considered “innovative.”
That’s how I see it at least. YMMV.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “But if you similarly poked around in virtually every Adobe product you’d probably uncover video files that were born on Quicktime, text files born on Word, sounds born on ProTools etc, etc.”
Created in, yes. Still part of the actual architecture, no. Or at least I doubt it. At least not in the same way. In fact, Adobe, like Avid, has had to rebuild a lot of components that used to be supported by QuickTime, but are no longer, because Apple has moved to AVFoundation and away from QuickTime.
Just to be clear in regards to FCPX, I’m not talking about files made with Photoshop. I’m talking about actual .psd files (Photoshop format), when they could have been JPEG, TIFF or PNG files instead.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[greg janza] “So what’s the problem?”
How many Adobe software packages do you use out of the CC?
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “How many Adobe software packages do you use out of the CC?”
I don’t know about Greg – and I may not be typical – but if you were asking in general –
Premiere Pro
After Effects
Media Encoder
Photoshop
Illustrator
Audition
Acrobat
Muse
Bridge
LightroomSome more than others, of course. I think if people who have CC are being honest, even if they prefer FCPX, they are actually using more Adobe CC apps than they think they are or like to admit.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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Like Oliver, I too use several Adobe programs:
Premiere
Media Encoder
After Effects
Photoshop
Illustrator
Bridge
Audition
Portfolio
BehanceI also make use of their stock footage library, design elements, cloud backup of projects and libraries for sharing branding guides (color specs, etc per client ) between After Effects, Premiere and Photoshop.
And I think this variety of offerings makes the subscription model a very reasonable cost of doing business.
Windows 10 Pro
i7-5820k CPU
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
Adobe CC 2018
Renders/cache: Samsung SSD 950 Pro x2 in Raid 0
Media: Samsung SSD 960 PRO PCIe NVMe M.2 2280
Media: OWC Thunderbay 4 x 2 Raid 0 mirrored with FreeFileSync -
And, of course my list is down to…
None of the above.
I did have a month where I needed Photoshop and Lightroom to process a photo shoot.
So I bought a “Drug Store Vanilla Visa Card” to use for a one month subscription and it worked perfectly.
I put $25 on that card, paid my single month Photo Subscription out of it. And at the end of the month, since that card had no value left, it couldn’t charge it again.
I haven’t even thought of my photo subscription in the 4 months since then – but unlike the old days, I don’t see any monthly auto-charges posting. Works for me!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.
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