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AE competitor
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[Tim Wilson] “I hope that nobody here will argue that we as pro users are not a pain in Apple’s ass at least occasionally.”
I think the problem with Shake from Apple’s point of view was that it is a microscopically small market that at the same time has astronomically high expectations in respect of product development.
If you just look at the changes in the VFX world that have taken place since Shake was EOL’d, there have been giant strides forward year on year that only dedicated players have been able to keep up with.
If we then look at the pace of development on Apple’s video products, namely FCP X and Motion, it’s plain to see that they are not in the business of keeping up with this kind of change, to say the very least!
It’s sound commercial sense not to be wasting time with niche products like Shake …
But as someone who, like most in the VFX community, really, really liked working with Shake, it’s a sadness to me that it was killed.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “FCP never got a facelift, but that’s probably because by the time the facelift was needed they knew they were going to start from scratch anyway so why bother?”
Exactly. I think they already HAD gotten started, in work that was bearing fruit in iMovie first, simply because iMovie didn’t have any baggage to carry.
I think this also underscores that flipping the switch to a more modern FCP 8 had been off the table for many, many years.
[Andrew Kimery] “hought about bringing up Ron Brinkmann’s post as a case-in-point, but every time I have it’s turned into a firestorm. ;)”
I’m hopeful that a gentle soul such as yourself just now agreeing with me on his relevance might prevent people from teeing off on an a-hole like me bringing it up. LOL
[Andrew Kimery] “I think Shake’s implementation of Optical Flow and SmoothCam were probably the two most well know. How many ‘smaller’ things found their way into Motion I have no idea.”
Simon is right, though, that Motion had those already.
My predecessor at Boris FX, Dion Scoppettuolo, left to run the team at Autodesk that worked on what became Motion after Apple bought it, and where he continued to manage it for several years.
When I was still “just” a customer of Boris, Dion was already working on implementing (and getting my meager input as a beta tester) motion tracking, stabilization, and optical flow features that were well nigh unto completion by the time Dion left and I arrived. Those, and the fundamentally particle-based nature of Motion were very exciting to him, at least when he showed it to me…although his demo might have been skewed by the interest he knew *I* had in tracking, stabilization, and optical flows, all passions of mine, for sure.
That’s not to say that Nothing Real’s math wasn’t swapped in after the acquisition to make Motion work faster or better or optimized in some other way. Maybe it was. Maybe we’re all right. 🙂
BTW, Motion is the product that became the MOST Apple-like of anything that Apple ever bought imo. I think that reflected a seriousness of development intent that I just never saw with FCP…but most definitely DID see with the decidedly home-grown iMovie. So it was never a surprise to me to see Apple’s first home-grown *PRO* NLE look more like both iMovie AND Motion than the gently tweaked Macromedia-developed look of FCP.
Although lord knows that the formerly-Adobe, Ubillos-led team that Macromedia brought in to develop Keygrip, which evolved into Final Cut sure made something that was pretty damn un-Macromedia-like in the scheme of things. Can you imagine if Macromedia’s NLE was some kind of outgrowth of Director????
Although if you (like me) bought version 1 of Macromind (their original name) MediaMaker, then you know that the reality is even worse than you imagined. LOL So there are in fact limits to the shade I throw on the relative lack of nurturing Apple showed to FCP. LOL It could so, so, so have been worse.
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[Simon Ubsdell] ”
I could be wrong too (!) but I think we had optical flow in Motion before they introduced the stabilisation option.”Of the two of us, I’m pretty sure you’re more likely to be right about this. 🙂
Shawn
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[Simon Ubsdell] “It’s sound commercial sense not to be wasting time with niche products like Shake …
But as someone who, like most in the VFX community, really, really liked working with Shake, it’s a sadness to me that it was killed.”
I talked a lot about this at the time that Avid EOL’d D|S. Some especially adamant D|S fans (of which there were understandably plenty) took this as a sign of Avid’s intent to kill it from Day 1, which is nonsense. Avid certainly developed the UI more than Apple did FCP’s….
…although who knows? Maybe Apple’s intent for Final Cut was always to kill that form of it? There was simply no incentive NOT to monetize it in the meantime???? Okay, a bit extreme even for me, but not entirely devoid of evidence. LOL
But no, I sat next to the D|S product manager for 3 years, Matt Allard, one of the most customer-focused product professionals it has ever been my pleasure to know. He was driven.
Here’s what came along in very, very short order, though, in no particular order:
— A Blackmagic’d Resolve, which was surely the nail in the coffin. And tbh, the D|S killer was the high-end version. D|S’ers had long lamented the lack of a robust control surface, which was something of a deal-killer in Europe in fact…then along comes a stupefyingly low price for the best control surface WITH better-than-ever software?
— eyeon fusion (bought by BMD well after DS’s demise of course, but a pain for quite some time)
— Scratch
— Pablo
— GPU-juiced After Effects, while still not as slippery-smooth as some would like, and obviously non-nodal, still, After Effects has taken bigger and bigger bites out of EVERYONE, from Chyron on down. I think AE was the end of the road for Deko in this exact timeframe, for example.
— mistika
— Baselight
— Mac-based Nitris hardware Symphony — less that Avid de-prioritized D|S in Symphony’s favor than that a lot of Symphony guys who’d moved to D|S because they needed its power now had it back in Symphony where they always wanted it….
— AND A LITTLE THING CALLED NUKE.
That’s just off the top of my head for the last handful of years, but DAY-YUM. D|S was getting eaten by cheaper products, more expensive but focused products, and products in every single niche represented in its vast feature set.
Maybe some theoretically more nimble company than Avid could have sustained it longer…but that’s a hell of a theory, even for me. LOL I was a believer, and I swear that Avid was too (heck, the FREE version of D|S was freaking amazing), but there’s only so many piranhas anyone can fight off.
Now, compare that to Apple and Shake: the product getting eaten from every side, yes, with the difference being that Shake was NOT Apple’s top of the line product, was NOT its most heavily-powered product, NOT the finale of every post product lineup demo — duuuuude, it’s amazing Shake stuck around in product form for as long as it did.
And inevitable that D|S had to go. It died an honorable death, though. LOL
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[Tim Wilson] “Exactly. I think they already HAD gotten started, in work that was bearing fruit in iMovie first, simply because iMovie didn’t have any baggage to carry.”
iMovie had some baggage, but not as much as FCP. With iMovie ’08 (released in 2007) Apple completely rewrote it and redesigned it. iMovie ’06 was a mature product and had a brushed metal theme similar to FCP. iMovie ’08 changed the visual style to what we see in iMovie, and X, today and it also went over like a lead balloon because it was barebones compared to iMovie ’06. The reaction was so negative that Apple made iMovie ’06 a free download for anyone that purchased iMovie ’08. Over the next two versions iMovie mostly regained all the features that iMovie 06 had.
[Tim Wilson] “Simon is right, though, that Motion had those already.”
The world may never know… 😉
According to Wikipedia Apple acquired Silicon Grail (which made compositing software) and Nothing Real in 2002. Was Motion an existing product at Autodesk Tim, or was it a prototype in a lab when Apple got its hands on it? Since Apple didn’t release Motion until 2004 that seems like enough time for them to take cherry pick the parts they wanted from the different acquisitions and roll them into a new product.
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[Tim Wilson] “I talked a lot about this at the time that Avid EOL’d D|S. Some especially adamant D|S fans (of which there were understandably plenty) took this as a sign of Avid’s intent to kill it from Day 1, which is nonsense. Avid certainly developed the UI more than Apple did FCP’s..”
I think another nail – possibly the first and biggest – was to try to make the DS interface more like Media Composer in order to push it onto the MC user market. Plus a muddled marketing message that Symphony wouldn’t become an HD machine – until it did. This did nothing to endear DS to the MC folks and along the way, alienated the DS users, as well.
As far as your timeline of products… In my recollection, DS was already close to EOL by the time these things came along. However a key cost faster was price. When Avid first introduced the HD version of DS, they were pushing the $400K mark for a turnkey system. That was silly even for Avid and for that time. It quickly dropped, but that certainly alienated people.
In fact, that price miscalculation directly pushed some folks to FCP. Remember at that time, HD was more of a marketing hook than a lot of actual production. For a LOT less money than $400K, you could buy a tricked out Mac, storage, Cinewave HD and FCP and have a tool that could at least conform uncompressed HD. So offline on your old SD MC, then ingest HD and conform in FCP. Once Avid made that sort of misjudgment, it was hard to recover from it.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “In my recollection, DS was already close to EOL by the time these things came along. “
Some of them, yes, but by no means all. It was the cumulative effect. And certainly by the time the EOL came to pass, I don’t see how anyone, anywhere, no matter how much they loved D|S, could say with a straight face that it still had a place anywhere but in their hearts. Certainly not in the market, and imo it wasn’t Avid’s fault.
You know what else accumulated? EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. LOL
I know you remember this, Oliver, but in the 2004-ish timeframe, the show-stopping D|S demo was a single track of 2K DPX files, with one layer of primary color correction, playing a full 30 seconds in real time. LOL It was the Martin Scorsese Amex commercial, remember?
People got so lathered up that there was NO WAY a system that cost “so little” could do this that they were actually yelling out during the demo “Prove it!!!”, so part of the demo evolved to include actually lifting out one single one of the files. LOL “See? It’s not a self-contained media container or movie. It’s FILES!!!”
And people STILL came up to the stage afterward, not just to check the files, but to check the storage, to make sure that we weren’t doing some switcho-changeo with playing the demo off tape….
…which I know you remember happened quite regularly back in the day, Oliver, and not on Avid, since of course RT performance was not really part of the MC pitch 25 years ago.
By the time of its EOL, was there ANY system that COULDN’T play a single layer of HD files with one primary color correction for 30 seconds without a hiccup? Hell, most of ’em could do it on a laptop.
[Oliver Peters] “When Avid first introduced the HD version of DS, they were pushing the $400K mark for a turnkey system. “
Yes, but this was considered disruptive enough to be causing pain to its customers. Especially in the DNA era, the system cost less than similarly featured products from Autodesk, and their clients knew it, so the houses were being forced to CHARGE less. This turned ugly fast, because their monetization plan was based on a rate they could no longer get away with charging.
I’m tellin’ ya, man, all day every day, people were calling, BEGGING Avid to raise the price. I listened to ’em…and they were the exact opposite of the calls I was getting about MC pricing. LOL
The pleas to raise D|S’s price eventually evaporated of course, but there genuinely had been a significant swath of its customer base not at all happy to see the prices for it keep dropping.
[Oliver Peters] “So offline on your old SD MC, then ingest HD and conform in FCP. “
Yes, I mentioned this dynamic in an earlier post. I saw this a LOT. It definitely accelerated with Final Touch, and lit up even more with Color. But I feel like that came much more at Symphony’s expense than D|S’s.
And to an earlier point in the thread, very little of that displaced MC from creative editorial per se. MC still has the lion’s share, and if the 2009 ACE survey is to be believed, MC marketshare was slightly UP even before FCP EOL.
The FCP/Color online scheme caused pain for Avid’s ability to add satellite products into those houses, though, to be sure.
That said, the Mac Symphony Nitris was a very successful launch…which, on the flip side, did nothing to displace the cozy home that FCP (and Color) had set up in finishing. 🙂
It’s like cameras. They all got cheaper, except for the ones that got more expensive. LOL
And cheap, hardware-independent finishing systems came along at EXACTLY the same time that proprietary hardware systems like Pablo, Baselight, mistika, and the top of the line Resolve all blossomed.
The story of this industry in the past 7-10 years has to account for BOTH dynamics, or it ain’t the full story.
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[Tim Wilson] “Especially in the DNA era, the system cost less”
Ugh. DNA on MC – what a joke! “The power of 40 Pentiums!” A very dubious claim. The scary part is those “marketeers” at Avid are still employed there.
[Tim Wilson] “I’m tellin’ ya, man, all day every day, people were calling, BEGGING Avid to raise the price”
Sure, post houses arguing for protectionism.
[Tim Wilson] “That said, the Mac Symphony Nitris was a very successful launch.”
Also one of Avid’s better products. At least the PC version was.
[Tim Wilson] “The story of this industry in the past 7-10 years has to account for BOTH dynamics, or it ain’t the full story.”
Agreed.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Replying to several posts at once:
[Oliver Peters] “DNA on MC – what a joke! “The power of 40 Pentiums!” A very dubious claim. The scary part is those “marketeers” at Avid are still employed there.”
As far as I can tell — and I have NO INSIDE INFORMATION ON THIS, as the specifics predate me — but speaking strictly as another opinionated a-hole on the internet, it LOOKS to me that the only “acceleration” was a hardware DV compressor-decompressor. Not really solving a huge problem. LOL
On D|S, and later Symphony, though, Nitris hardware acceleration appeared to be real….although you probably know more about than I do.
That’s all ima say about that though. LOL
[Oliver Peters] “Sure, post houses arguing for protectionism.”
Well, I’d put it a little more empathetically — their business model was based on $600 rooms, not $100 rooms, and the industry was changing faster than the depreciation schedule — but that’s all ima say about that too. LOL
[Andrew Kimery] “iMovie ’08 changed the visual style to what we see in iMovie, and X, today and it also went over like a lead balloon because it was barebones compared to iMovie ’06. The reaction was so negative that Apple made iMovie ’06 a free download for anyone that purchased iMovie ’08. Over the next two versions iMovie mostly regained all the features that iMovie 06 had.”
Hey, wait a minute: a sweeping interface change, stripping out features and causing widespread discontent, even market chaos, until those features came back a couple of years later??? Where have I heard THAT before? LOL
Or should I say, where have I heard that SINCE? LOL
[Andrew Kimery] “Was Motion an existing product at Autodesk Tim, or was it a prototype in a lab when Apple got its hands on it? Since Apple didn’t release Motion until 2004 that seems like enough time for them to take cherry pick the parts they wanted from the different acquisitions and roll them into a new product.”
My eye was no longer on this particular ball, and of course a lot of it was happening behind closed doors…but my fuzzy recollection is that the Autodesk component of what became Motion was still a lab-only product at the time.
You’re right, a couple of years would have provided ample time for Apple to roll their own product from their flurry of purchases at the time, which, again, Apple was clearly motivated to do.
This mightily contrasts with Final Cut, which, yes, was still in the lab when Apple bought it, but only barely. It was VERY well developed, and close enough to the finish line that Apple could clean out all that Windows crap LOL and still ship it a year later.
Impressive in itself for sure, but I think it reflects the extent to which Apple didn’t really really REALLY take the time to make it as Apple-y as they could have with more time….which they clearly didn’t see the value of before the end of its life, for whatever reasons.
No disrespect intended. Worked out pretty well I s’pose. LOL Just trying to track the breadcrumbs backwards.
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[Tim Wilson] “My predecessor at Boris FX, Dion Scoppettuolo, left to run the team at Autodesk that worked on what became Motion after Apple bought it, and where he continued to manage it for several years.”
Wow, I had no idea that Motion was sort of purchased from Autodesk. Apple did a great job making it their own.
[Tim Wilson] “That’s not to say that Nothing Real’s math wasn’t swapped in after the acquisition to make Motion work faster or better or optimized in some other way. Maybe it was. Maybe we’re all right. :-)”
I always doubted the claim that Shake lives on in Motion. Doing the math for compositing is easy; building the architecture of a compositor worth using is the hard part.
Apple already had institutional expertise in the area of optical flow before Nothing Real. Peter Litwinowicz had worked at Apple for a while before going off to work on What Dreams May Come and then co-found RE:Vision FX and develop Twixtor. Then three years passed between Apple’s acquisition of Nothing Real in 2002 and the announcement of Shake 4, the first version with optical flow, in 2005. How far along could Nothing Real have been on optical flow when Apple bought them? Surely the Nothing Real team, the people themselves, was more strategically important than that IP.
On a separate note, while we’re reviewing history, does anyone know the true story of the oft-rumored, never-seen Apple Phenomenon?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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