Apple is at NAB!!!

[Craig Shields]

Yep, that’s what it used to be like at an Apple booth. I remember at my first NAB I had no plan. I just showed up and before I knew it, I had wasted my whole 1st day watching all the Apple demos.

[Derek Andonian]

[Lance Bachelder] I actually met both Apple FCPX team members

Wow, you met BOTH members? I have a little more respect for FCPX now- I mean, if there’s only two guys working on that thing, what they’ve done is pretty impressive… 😉

[Lance Bachelder] For you Premiere lovers it’s a sight to behold – whenever Premiere is up on the big screen in the Adobe theater the hundreds of seats are packed and there literally hundreds more standing and watching – every time.

That’s really cool. Sounds like this release is really going to be amazing…

______________________________________________
“Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine… But after this windmill it’s the future or bust.”

[Oliver Peters]

That hallowed booth position has long been replaced by Blackmagic Design.

And Lance is correct. Spoke to the same folks myself, however, they are wearing Sony badges, as are other third party demo folks.

FWIW – there are plenty of instances of FCP X through the show in various booths. Another interesting thing to note. There are various press folks covering the show in video. Just about everyone that I’ve seen in the press room has been cutting their pieces on FCP X on MBPs.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Lance Bachelder]

Yeah I have a few hours off tomorrow before we close 🙁 and plan to hit the Adobe demos and Avid.

Oliver is right though – FCPX is actually alive and well in many booths throughout the show – we have it running on several pods in the AJA booth too – along with the new Adobe suite of course. But generally wherever you see some sort of Thunderbolt device running on a Mac FCPX is there…

As far as Thunderbolt goes though – amazing that this year HP and others are really selling Thunderbolt hard – but on PC’s – not Macs.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Eric Santiago]

I took in most of the courses at NAB and found a few things that irked me.
Even though the speakers and trainers were great people, I found Adobe’s marketing machine a bit too heavy during the courses.
What was laid out as informative course in some specific fashion turned out to be a demo of mostly their new software that students in the class found interesting but felt (after talking to most of them) that sitting there watching them show it off turned into a small room demo.
All the Adobe classes were full but just as much as the popular FCPX ones with the likes of Mr. Greenberg, Adam and Steve, etc..
The only sad site was a few of the Avid classes seemed dead and listless.
The information given was good and helpful but my feeling was that MC at its present state is dying interest with the new users.
I got to see the new version of everything and enjoyed learning about them.
My favourite has to be Resolve but Im biased since I love using that app.
Back to Apple.
They were everywhere as far as their desktop offerings and almost 95% of the students were holding some type of Apple product during classes.
Please this was my experience at this years NAB.
I took in a lot since I got here last Friday.
Slept on average of 3 hours and on site from 8am till 6pm.
As usual the SuperMeet was a blast 🙂

[Brett Sherman]

Interesting. I’m beginning to wonder if Premiere is more of a threat to Avid than FCP X. I can see Premiere taking more and more of the high end market. And regardless of the negative opinions of FCP X that people like to espouse on this board, I think there will always be a place for FCP X at the low to mid-level.

I also think eventually there will be a place at the high end once project sharing is improved in FCP X. But it may take awhile for FCP X to gain footholds there as it has been too slow in coming.

[Steve Connor]

[Brett Sherman] “Interesting. I’m beginning to wonder if Premiere is more of a threat to Avid than FCP X.”

I would imagine it is, add to that a second front from Lightworks and Avid are going to have a battle on their hands in the coming months and years.

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Craig Seeman]

[Brett Sherman] “Interesting. I’m beginning to wonder if Premiere is more of a threat to Avid than FCP X. “

Toss Lighworks on that list as well. An NLE (free/low cost) with some Hollywood cred by a company that also has a high end storage product.

[Lance Bachelder]

Totally agree – I got a demo of the OSX version and it’s really looking solid – total parity across three different operating systems along with insanely low cost could be formidable in the near future.

One blogging team that stopped by AJA booth to shoot an interview mentioned that in all their meetings the feeling was that high-end pro’s were staying Avid, indie studios were going Premiere but the web producers and one-man-bands were going FCPX. The debate rages on…

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Oliver Peters]

[Lance Bachelder] “that high-end pro’s were staying Avid, indie studios were going Premiere but the web producers and one-man-bands were going FCPX.”

I would agree. Right now, there is still nothing that competes with ISIS/Interplay/MC as a single-sourced, supported, enterprise-grade solution. EditShare and GV are the next closest.

Avid intro’ed some bundles that start this package at under $50K (with 3 MC licenses), which is in the range for even smaller facilities or stations. While still a premium, it’s no longer 2x or 3x of what a similar solution of competing “parts” would be, when cobbled together by a reseller. Long-in-the-tooth or not, MC as an editor is still the most robust (proven) solution, given almost any type of production. ISIS/Interplay/MC is the “you won’t get fired for buying IBM” answer.

Remember that now for $2500, you get Symphony, BCC filters, AvidFX (Boris RED), Avid DVD and Squeeze. This cost is what MC alone was last month (with the last 3 apps). But I don’t see it as the app to attract hords of new users, which is their challenge. However, traditional film schools are still installing and teaching MC.

Adobe Premiere Pro “next” is more nimble, but the appeal is still as the FCP7-replacement and the NLE to use for heavy AE users. Adobe Anywhere is a complete unknown and ultimately will land you in the Avid-enterprise range when it comes to cost. It’s a solution for large shops and broadcasters, just like ISIS/Interplay.

This leaves FCP X as the light, flawed, fast editor that hopefully will grow. In my travels, I heard plenty of developers – especially for plug-ins – complain about X and its market. Despite people on this forum telling me that users will still buy expensive plug-ins, I am hearing quite the opposite. X users who pay $299 for the host app, simply are not investing in large numbers in plug-in packages that cost a lot more than the host. So a plug-in like Baselight Editions at $1K isn’t going to get many X users, which in turn means an X version might never make it out of the lab. And the architecture hampers developers like Red Giant and GenArts, as well.

Look towards more synergy with FCP X and Resolve 10. In fact, Resolve uses the Open FX API, so you will likely see some interesting development of plug-ins for Resolve. Offline in FCP X and grade/conform/finish in Resolve 10. That’s the theory anyway.

The wild cards are Autodesk Smoke and Lightworks Mac. I think they appeal to vastly different markets, but each company is trying to be very responsive to potential users. So it could be a very fun time ahead (insert Chinese curse here).

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com