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Complicated means Pro : Simplified is Dumb/Amateurish
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[Glen Hurd] ” First time I’d have to disagree with you Scott 🙂 What demise?”
I was using the term demise to paraphrase what Gerald was saying.
However, I would say there has been a downsizing of the industry at the upper end. Both with a loss of facilities, and a trend of lower rates. But this has little to do with FCP, or the noobs. They just think it’s about them, isn’t everything?
The reality is this started long before FCP, or even Avid came along. Affordable analog gear started that trend back in the 80’s. And one of the biggest places this has hurt is in broadcast. Dropping ad revenues have caused a reliance on automation and ‘plug ‘n play’ gear. I think this is why hourly wages have remained stagnant and stations are having a harder time keeping/attracting qualified workers. So they hire one guy like you or I, and then the rest are these low wage newbies. This is like the chicken and the egg, and I don’t know if you can directly attribute this to the noobs.
IMO where the noobs hurt rates the most is at the mid level, or what we used to call industrial. It’s not that their ‘mad skills’, but a perfect storm with a huge supply of people with zero overhead willing to work cheap, a down economy, and a class of clients that are new to production and aren’t aware that they have a better choice.
I do think that trend is changing. Myself, and several in my immediate circle of production folks have seen an increase in these gigs in the past 6 months, which is ok. When you don’t live on one of the coasts, big high end jobs don’t walk in the door everyday. Most of the work is clients migrating from in-house/DIY, or from those who had been using these low/no overhead coffee shop guys, and want to up their game.[Glen Hurd] “Considering their new interest in incorporating gestures into Lion, I have a gesture here for them. The one-finger salute. Put that in your iCloud and smoke it.”
Ah, yes. The digitus impudicus. One of the earliest forms of digital communication, with data compression.
Lion, ‘the cloud’, X, updates that are nothing more than adding app store access to the OS, dropping Shake, EOLing FCS3, the list of apple giving us the finger just keeps getting bigger. I’s about time to give it back.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Gary Huff] “”slim lined world””
Could be any or all of these:
On camera mic for audio.
No tripod.
No lights.
No proper workstation with reference monitors for audio/video.
No office, just a noisy coffee shop for client meetings.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Gerald Baria] “shouldn’t you just spend enough time with it that you’ll be able to do your edits as easily or even easier than you could with PPro,FCP7 or Avid?”
Twenty minutes is about enough for anybody who’s been editing full time to realize that FCPX is totally screwed up. I’ve read enough posts on this forum to see that most people finding FCPX easier to work with than FCP or MC are either casual editors or people who have the luxury to work under very little pressure. In my opinion anybody finding original FCP interface complicated should get less demanding job and stop waisting clients’ time and money.
I made this post extremely rude on purpose. I’m fed up with this all this arrogant “creative power to the people” bullshit. If you want to say “You’re a bunch of insecure old farts so shut up” have the courage to say so. There are better chances for creativity in strong and direct language than in heaps of second hand banalities.
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[Glen Hurd] “I was trashing the concept that newbs armed with FCP X/cheap gear can overtake an industry. When you were newbs did you think you could?”
No. This is the same as trying to sink the boat you are sitting in. Which is one of the most perplexing, and prevalent traits of the newbies and the cult of X.
They spend a huge amount of time bashing the ‘Pros’ and complaining about workflows and UI’s that are “too complicated”. Perhaps they have no plans to become a mid-level or high end professionals, or use anything other than a basic workflow. If that is the case, why bother getting in the biz? Why would anyone that is at the beginning of their career want to lock themselves into the entry level phase of it permanently? And to rail on and on in a public forum that this is the future,you hope for, and are actively working to achieve? What kind of future is that? To pine for a future where all work is simplified and dumbed-down, the video equivalent of ditch digging, makes no sense. At least not to me.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Michael Aranyshev] “I made this post extremely rude on purpose. I’m fed up with this all this arrogant “creative power to the people” bullshit. If you want to say “You’re a bunch of insecure old farts so shut up” have the courage to say so. There are better chances for creativity in strong and direct language than in heaps of second hand banalities.”
That is funny that you say that. When I read some of the posts complaining about the old timers and how we are afraid of the revolution that’s coming, I picture a 20-something hipster, sitting alone, wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, in a trendy urban coffee shop, typing it on an ipad, while his Macbook has a vimeo of some unheard of band going on it.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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I completely agree. Professional=Flexible, Consumer=Simplified/Inflexible. This is true in most product categories, beyond NLE’s and even software.
The main reason I haven’t jumped into FCPX is that it does not seem flexible enough for me…though it may be for other editors. For most of my projects, I don’t have the last word, my client does. The client doesn’t care whether it’s difficult or easy to make the change, they just want their changes as quickly as possible.
As a one-man band, I build my projects to make revisions and iterations easy, not necessarily for raw speed. My project last week went through 13 versions in three days, and the last two versions lifted an outake from an old project to create a new open and intro. I was able to open that old project side by side with the new one, step through my select timeline, and copy the three relevant clips into my new project. That’s not an optional, “nice to have” feature for me, it’s a necessity.
So I keep coming back to this forum (and the FCPX techniques forum) to look for news and reports of successful use of FCPX in the kind of short-turnaround, client-driven situations I work in. I hope that FCPX becomes as flexible and powerful as FCP 7 has been.
Chris Walsh
http://www.musicfog.com
Silver Spring, MD
Final Cut & AVID MC5
Former Windows User and edit* lover -
One day a boy and his father were walking along the beach.
The boy noticed a crab catcher carrying a bucket of crabs. The crab bucket did not have a top on it. He asked his father why the crabs were not able to escape.
His father said, “If there was only one crab in the bucket it would certainly escape. However, when there is more than one crab in the bucket, if one tries to crawl out, the other crabs grab hold and pull it back down so that it will share the same fate as the rest of them. ”
Crabs are such newbs! 🙂As for pricing – I don’t know everyone’s situation, but I look at my business as one giant ongoing negotiation. I make a big sacrifice to form a relationship that will barely pay my bills, and use that as my stepping stone to acquire customers that will pay me better. My pitch isn’t about production. It’s about how they can make money with mass communication and the importance of capturing their audience through the seduction of vision and sound. I think it really helps to have a philosophical understanding for what works, and a psychological grasp of how to steer a viewer. Because when you talk to a client in those terms, they grasp that what you are bringing to the table is strategy – not a list of equipment. And strategy is what wins wars. People will pay for that. Over and over once they see it works. I had one client ask me to do a new commercial for them, because the old one was outdated and they needed to stop running it. During the time it wasn’t running, he said it was costing him $180,000 a month in business. Not running my commercial. Getting feedback like that – often by mistake from the customer – is priceless.
I learned to focus on that from a boss I had a long time ago. He was always extracting information from people without them even realizing he was doing it. Now he’s a mortgage banker.
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I’ll respond to you directly, considering the original content of your post :).
I wasn’t belittling newbs for being newbs. Poor Gerald stumbled into a landmine by saying some of us were upset becauseFCP X ,and technology in general, was allowing newbs with cheaper equipment to “overtake” our jobs. It wasn’t just the mythical belief in software that bothered me, but the same clichéd accusation that those who despise FCP X are doing it only for emotional reasons. Getting a little tired of that.
So I swung back hard, pointing out the complete uselessness of a newb trying to take clients away from someone who is established.Look. I met a young man who’d finished 4 years at a local production school, and he was frustrated by his limited choices. I introduced him to FXPhd and tutored him on Shake and introduced him to PFTrack. I helped him plan shoots and lent him equipment. I told him he needed to accelerate his knowledge as fast as he could – past basic editing- or he was doomed. A year later, and he started working at one of the more prestigious houses in NY and already has his name on a movie credit. It’s not like I despise newbs. I help them. And my first step in helping them is to tell them that they are doomed – if they do nothing.
But I will concede that I came off too strong. It was 4 in the morning, so who knows how rational I was being.
And of course we were all newbs once. I just don’t know how many thought they were going to take over the industry because they had a cheap camera and some software. If they did, they were sure in for a rude awakening.As to your “magic hour” comment, I didn’t understand what you were trying to say. But it did remind me of the classic newb magic-hour-mistake. Of course I know from experience. Heh. If you color-balance during magic hour, you don’t get magic hour. The point of magic hour is to capture the warmer tones, so you keep your white balance at its default setting. All that warmth and the glowing skin-tones kinda go away once you drop your white balance down to the high 3000s.
Not that you’ve ever done that, but it’s a classic example of having gear and a basic education, and having no idea how to apply the subtleties of the business.I do apologize for being so heavy handed on the above post. It wasn’t necessary.
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🙂
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Because apart from Photoshop I personally do not like Adobe software, specially the UI. Way to many buttons, symbols, etc.
Another big factor is that Adobe’s accounting policy to inflate overseas prices (I pay double! in Aus than you guys pay in the US) is ridiculous. Plus the fact that I would need another 5 K for new i/o and GPU…Just after FCPx came out I had a good look at Avid and Adobe and don’t like either of them. I did actually own an Avid for 5 years 12 years ago and when I saw 5.5 I felt nothing much has changed :-).
FCP 7 works fine and because we do in house only, we can transcode to ProRes to have everything working smoothly.
So I can understand why a guy like Walter with a big facility has to change if he can’t wait, but for us it’s not necessary.
All the best
Carsten
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